writing
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Lenten Lament 4 #Lent2019
A reminder that toxicity and destruction are directed against many of the beloved. A reminder that we all must continue in the pursuit of justice and peace. via Lenten Lament 4 #Lent2019
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#Waking Up White Chapter 13: Invisibility
“We were pushed hard to be cognizant of what we did and did not notice. And most importantly, why?” This is the hardest—the why of our actions and our inattention. Why do I feel that white people around me are just worth my time, and yet black people are somehow safe to exclude? That came from somewhere, and I picked it up, but why do I think this and act this way—that is the part of me that still has mysterious roots. Did I really choose to be racist? Based upon what I’m reading and thinking about, it seems more and more likely that yes, I did choose this. “I…
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Hope
“Hope always breaks my heart. And yet hope always restores my soul.” One of the difficulties of any endeavor is that there is just no guarantee of success. A journey is not like a recipe, where, if you put in the right ingredients at the right time, mix it in the right way, and bake it for the right amount of time, you’ll get, barring any spectacular issues, the thing that you expected. A cake recipe makes a cake, a pie recipe makes a pie, a cashew chicken recipe makes a decent plate of food for a dinner, a dinner that I’m eating right now. The journey, tho? No guarantees…
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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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Guest link – #SeminaryWhileBlack
This is a link to a blog I follow—The Won Percent—and I want to note, upfront, that I am not promoting the hashtag #SeminaryWhileBlack. That would be presumptuous of me, not to mention appropriative. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the post, especially as I read accounts from students at seminaries who discover that their texts are usually from the same source—European men. It’s critical that we have a broader view of theology than just what was created in cold North climes. There is a tremendous need for something more that what’s been traditionally offered. And the quote from Carter Woodson, from the 1920s, is just killer: In schools of theology Negroes…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 11: Headwinds and Tailwinds
“Skin color itself is not the barrier; it’s the beliefs attached to it. And beliefs, compared to birth dates or other more tangible barriers, are harder to pinpoint and also much harder to change.” The chapters are starting to get down into the weeds now, and it’s getting thornier to navigate. This chapter explores the systems that create systemic racism. Helpfully, it does not just say that systemic racism is a thing, but it explores the interlocking small systems that make up the bigger system. The systemic part of the systems—they all work together in their small cycles to become one big Krebs cycle of racism. This reveals something in…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, education, family, history, Life Recovery Skills, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 10: The Melting Pot
“The United States has reaffirmed its commitment to being a melting-pot society adhering to Anglo-Saxon standards, as opposed to a mosaic nation built on the diversity of multiple cultures.” This chapter dives into a common myth about America—that it is a “melting pot.” It is, if by that you mean that everyone is baptized with fire to lose their heritage and identity, to be reborn as a WASP-y character—as long as they have visibly white skin and features. The stories here match some of the experiences of my mother’s side of the family—she was an immigrant from World War II, and when she went through Ellis Island (figuratively; I’m not…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 9: White Superiority
[Edited 2/23/2019 A point of clarification on this post: the indented portions are quotes from the book by Debby Irving, “Waking Up White.” Along with several other people, some who are posting in public, I’m going through the book chapter-by-chapter, attempting to think out loud what I my responses are and what my desires are. While I am attempting to be truthful, I am also attempting to be sensitive to my friends and family in the wider community, including my friends and family who are of non-European descent. If something I write seems injurious to you, please do let me know—while my intent is one thing, I realize that impact…
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Prayer to Persephone
Today’s post is just poetry, this time from the sublime Edna St. Vincent Millay: Prayer to Persephone by Edna St. Vincent Millay Be to her, Persephone, All the things I might not be; Take her head upon your knee. She that was so proud and wild, Flippant, arrogant and free, She that had no need of me, Is a little lonely child Lost in Hell,—Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, “My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here.”
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I’m Just Here to Dance
I had an interesting question the other day: are Christians good? The subject came up because there is a defense offered by some Christians (and some people outside the faith, I imagine) that we Christians are “good” by dint of the Savior redeeming us from sin. We are given a new, God-inspired and -directed nature. Our sins and our past are washed way into the sea of forgiveness. We have God’s very Spirit in us to remind us and prompt us and even empower us. We can move through love into the Kingdom… All the theology comes to mind, and I could write like this for a long time without…
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Trying Every Doorknob
What do I do about the things that I see that I think aren’t right? What do I do about the situations where injustice occurs, where oppression is maintained, where there is no room for the human and the person and the needs to be understood, much less addressed? So much is a giant system that is rolling on unchecked, and all I have are these small tools and weak commitments that are easily broken by adamant obstacles...
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 8: Racial Categories
“The biggest problem with America’s idea of racial categories is that they’re not just categories: they’ve been used to imply a hierarchy born of nature. Regardless of how racial categories came into being, Americans have been cast in racial roles that have the power to become self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecies.” There’s some great things in this chapter which pulls apart racial categories using a great analogy of dividing people arbitrarily into groups based upon hair color. Each hair color is associated with a type of achievement based upon who-knows-what, but there is some assignment done that people accept. (Work with me here. It’s analogy.) Now, over time, the original philosophy of…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 7: The GI Bill
“I couldn’t shake the duped feeling—duped and infuriated to have inherited a legacy that contaminated me with injustice.” This chapter just slays. It nails the center of gravity in American white racism—Economics. Money. Power. Fear. Greed. Exclusion. Hatred. Willful ignorance and blind indifference. These are all here, but it boils down to economics. The earliest Africans brought here in August of 1619 were brought here as economically advantageous assets to white landowners, white entrepreneurs, white households. Chattel slavery was economics—how could you grow tobacco and cotton for the world market at competitive products at a profit if you had to pay your workers? Jim Crow was a de facto extension…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Civil War, American Exceptionalism, faith, history, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
“Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.” I suppose everyone needs a hero, and I suspect everyone wants to be a hero. This chapter explores the idea that we can want to resolve terrible issues in our culture and in our world, and we can even attempt to do so—all while being completely unware of what we’re doing and why. There’s an impulse to do good when we think we see a problem and we think we see the solution. “I…
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It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
You know, as we get older our sleep cycles shift. Used to be that I could sleep straight through, night after night, for six hours. In bed by 11pm, up at 5am, without an alarm clock. Fairly predictable. Things have changed—without my desire!—so that my sleeping patterns are irregular. I am desperate to get to bed before 9pm, I sleep until 1 am, and then I’m wide awake until 5am, where I sleep another hour then I’m up for the day. I don’t spend my time in bed tossing and turning. That does no good. I’m up. I’m thinking. I’m woke. I read, and sometimes I write. But recently I…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 5: Within the Walls
“For me, part of the waking-up-white process is acknowledging that I’m a recovering lemming*…I never considered that the space I was taking, or the resources I was using, might be being withheld from another to make it all possible.” I found this chapter to be provoking and troubling, and I lead off with this twinned set of quotes. So much of my experience is similar author, not in fulfillment but in similar design. The creation of whiteness, and its enveloping me with its cocoon, led me to believe that this is just how things were as a child and even as an adult, that it was reasonable to expect others…
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Waking Up White, Introduction
Debby Irving mentions her childhood in a privileged New England family. An interesting article was posted Thursday by the New Bedford Historical Society, about Black Native American whaling captains. Notice the reference to Moby Dick. Interesting, nearly 1600 whaling trips originated at Martha’s Vineyard from 1715 to 1928. A Black Native American friend of ours descends from the Algonquin who met the pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620. He married a white friend of ours of Danish heritage. He also has Navajo heritage. Both have been Baha’is for almost 50 years. https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2018/08/16/whaling-captains-diversity-flourished
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, faith, family, history, justice, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 4: Optimism
“By pretending the world was virtually problem-free, my family culture left me grossly underprepared to solve problems.” The 50s and 60s were a time in America unlike any before or after. We had won a war (with the uncredited assistance of Russia who lost 10 million men and 14 million civilians to our 410 thousand men and some civilians), there were no real economic challenges (Soviet Russia was a political challenge, but who knows how much of it was hyped up to win votes?), we were prosperous and confident and expanding. Scouts and YMCA and camping and museums were all out there for our entertainment and enrichment, and we simply…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 3: Race Versus Class
“Which one is the real issue?” The temptation when confronting a difficult issue is to find a subsidiary issue, make that primary, resolve it, and be done. So it is with race and class. These two issues can be conflated but they are different, and the easiest way to show this is that we can move up and down class hierarchies, but we cannot move out of our race. “Race” is used as a distinguishing and exclusionary element in every class. There are a few interesting stories to illustrate this point—perhaps the most disconcerting is the one where Dr. John H. Franklin, honored by President Clinton with the Presidential Medal…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 2: Family Values
“One of the things my white mother could not teach me was to honor feelings of outrage.” This chapter is a short one—about family origins. What kind of family did you grow up in? My family is like all families, I suppose, in the sense that we half-invented it and half-followed existing models. That’s how you survive. In this chapter the author talks about the long history of her own family and how that controlled her own behaviors: it was instilled at an early age. Now, of course it was an all-white environment, but there was more. There was the subtle inculcation of values that established the author as white—and…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 1: What Wasn’t Said
This chapter* opens with a provocative quote by the author: “‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL THE INDIANS?’ I asked my mother on a Friday morning ride home from the library.” Gotta tell you, this not a question I had growing up in the 50s in the middle-class white suburbs of Los Angeles and Orange County. “Where are all the people of color?” I did not ask because for me the world was white. I cannot remember a single person I met before the mid 70s who was black except for our neighbor’s maid, and I tell you this with a sense of shame and embarrassment that I never knew her name,…
- #WakingUpWhite, Books, Celebrate Recovery, challenges, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see
James Baldwin* said this, I’m told: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I can’t find the source of this quote, but it is widely attributed to him, and as I see no one protesting that these are not his words, I’m gonna go with it. Which leads me to the main purpose of this post: to introduce you to a new project I’ll be undertaking with a few friends, a journey to read the book “Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” by Debby Irving. I’ve not read this before, so the plan is for each…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, faith, family, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, questions, racism
What Would You Do If You Could Bring Conciliation?
This is a review of the book “The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism” The key issue that continues to break America’s soul is racism. Full stop. One hundred fifty years before Yorktown there was Jamestown. 1619 was the arrival of captive slaves of African descent, sold to English settlers and colonists looking for cheap labor that could be used for profit and personal success. By 1667 Virginia had passed a law perpetuating the eternal status of chattel slaves; in the last half of the 18th century the same people who held self-evident truths of liberty also held black humans as property to be…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, essays, faith, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
Feats of Clay
Our heroes are flawed. Our villains have moments of redemptive grace. We live in a complex world, where we cannot depend upon someone being just someone, but instead they are always many things. I bring this up because Christmas 2018 is half-way over. (You do celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas from Dec 25 Christmas Day through January 6, Epiphany of the Gentiles, of course?) And in Christmastime one of the more popular carols (“Christmas hymns”) is the fantastic, overwhelming, joyful “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” It’s one of my favorites, both in the tune and in the words. Charles Wesley wanted a song that was solemn and majestic, befitting…
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For I Am Not Ashamed of the Gospel—Except the Hard Parts
I saw this on the NPR website this morning, and it sparked a reaction in me. https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/674995075/slave-bible-from-the-1800s-omitted-key-passages-that-could-incite-rebellion On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves. What’s notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation. There’s a great verse in the Bible about the value of the Word. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of…
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Why It Matters: For you I was born, for you I live, and for you I give my last breath
I am involved in two streams right now that are greatly affecting me on how I see myself and what I consider my values. And in one of those streams the topic came up about why people do what they do. For me, the question is really “Why pursue racial conciliation?”, which was prompted by a statement from Jemar Tisby in his podcast “Color of Compromise Pre-Launch Interview” (appx 11/28/2018): “The more you pursue justice, the more of Jesus you get.” Why this matters to me is something I’ll explain. First, a brief immediate background. I’ve been working on my “stuff” for about ten years now. I have a lot…
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I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living
The prophet Amos cried out (in 5:24) the desire of God for righteousness to be the ocean we swim in, a sea of support and sustaining, a place of healing and recovery. But this is America 2018, and in America justice is far off. In this America of 2018, we have Jemel Roberson. A father, brother, son. Working extra hours to pay for Christmas for his son. A church member and talented musician. The friend of many people. He was doing his job as a security guard, holding a suspect in the ground, when the police shot him in spite of his uniform and the cries of the crowd that…
