racial justice

COVID-19 is culling the herd of humanity. Beneath the conversation about herd immunity lies a silent and unstated conversation about who will survive. Why are black and brown communities being hit so hard? Why are we more likely than whites to die if admitted to the hospital? Who gets access to health care of any kind, and with regard to COVID-19, to inequitably distributed tests? Who gets a ventilator and who does not?

TO UNDERSTAND MY evolution as a reconciliation leader, you must first understand that I began my journey sincerely believing that if I could convince evangelical Christians that reconciliation was not some politically motivated agenda but a biblical calling rooted in Scripture, they would pursue racial justice. For years I tried to be biblical enough, nonthreatening enough, patient enough, persuasive enough, theologically rigorous enough, so that no one could say I had a hidden agenda.

That’s what my ministry was about for a very long time. I preached the good news of multiculturalism and diversity at churches and conferences. I led workshops and taught seminars and told people about inclusion and equity and how Jesus demonstrated these principles in his ministry.

But along the way, there were indicators that my approach, while good and well-intentioned, was not effecting the type of change I knew in my heart needed to take place.

COVID-19 reveals the artificiality of the urban/rural divide. 

What value is there in circulating a depiction of innocent black death?

The overwhelming vote last week in the House of Representatives to designate lynching as a federal hate crime shows just how sluggish the pace of change can be in America.

This is what slow death looks like for the families of victims of police brutality.

Kanye West draws upon the storied history of black communal worship and gospel music. 

A racial leveraging of forgiveness followed Amber Guyger’s trial in Dallas.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was one of the worst environmental justice disasters in modern U.S. history. It was also one of the first times that I, then a teenager, consciously connected animal justice and racial justice. Kanye West’s declaration “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” is often remembered as the statement on racism in Katrina, but another expression that needed no words circulated among black people in the hurricane’s immediate aftermath: a picture of pets being evacuated on an air-conditioned bus.

While black people were abandoned, dead, and dying on rooftops, corpses floating bloated in flooded streets, people’s pets were evacuated to safety.

Black people have long understood as racist the disparate treatment of nonhuman animals and black people. In 1855, Frederick Douglass wrote that “The bond-woman lives as a slave, and is left to die as a beast; often with fewer attentions than are paid to a favorite horse.