white supremacy
Image via Kaitlin Barker Davis
I barely slept the night of the stabbing. It was a hot night, and I could hear the train tracks through our open windows. The last time I slept (or didn’t sleep) like that was election night. It was freezing, the windows closed, but the same nauseating dread kept my head buzzing, my jaw locked, my eyes open. Except that on election night it was the fear of the world I would wake up to that kept me awake. Now we know exactly what that world looks like.
WHEN WATCHING a creative imagining of what feels like your own demise, the last thing you want is for an audience to cheer. But for white women watching Get Out, the record-breaking horror flick from comedy writer Jordan Peele, that’s more or less what happened. It was a revealing moment, to say the least.
Get Out follows black photojournalist Chris, whose white girlfriend Rose invites him home for a weekend. To his terror, Chris slowly realizes that her nice, white, liberal family is masking a deep, violent racism. (“I would have voted for Obama for a third term” is a catchphrase played first as proof of the family’s “colorblindness” and later revealed to be a cover for their fetishization of black bodies.) Rose—a seemingly “woke” white woman, who yells at cops for unfairly profiling her black boyfriend—is, without giving too much away, a less-than-ideal ally.
The film was released one month after Trump’s inauguration, and it was easy to cheer for Chris as he took ownership of his fate and sought vengeance on his captors. In the last year, we’d seen unabashed patriarchal white supremacy pulling the levers in our politics and our churches. But then 52 percent of white women—many of them white Christian women—voted for Trump, and the role of white women in building and perpetuating damaging policies, narratives, and theologies was made more clear. Frankly, for me, and other white women who raced to see the film, Get Out felt like a chance to atone. White women have often skated by in the larger battles over identity and justice, inside and outside the church: Let us now give our money to the telling of truth.
To be a white woman in America is to be precariously power-adjacent: Because of our skin, we carry unquestioned privilege in power systems. Because of our gender, that security has a shelf life—we are included only as long as we are able or willing to perform according to those who control the levers.
Image via RNS/REUTERS/Terray Sylvester
A man facing murder charges, after he allegedly fatally stabbed two people and injured another on a Portland light-rail train, has a history of run-ins with law enforcement, and is a self-proclaimed white supremacist, authorities said.
Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, is charged with aggravated murder, attempted murder, intimidation in the second degree, and felony possession of a restricted weapon, stemming from the May 26 attack. Christian makes his first court appearance on May 30.
Image via Wes Dickinson/Flickr
Repairing isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s rarely as straightforward as we hope for. And sometimes it’s downright costly, or worse, impossible. If the church wants to be a part of repairing entire communities, we need to be willing to do at least three things: Gather the experts, put in the time, and give and live sacrificially.
Until the past year, I’d never seen a religious demographic — in this case, white evangelicals — so shamelessly coupled with a partisan identity. I thought Christians were citizens of heaven, whose faith transcends political divisions with the love of Jesus. Instead, it seems we have collectively placed ourselves, or been placed, on one side of a culture war in which no one seems to be winning, but all sides are becoming increasingly suspicious, cynical, and self-protective.
Image via REUTERS/Tom Gannam
Anti-Semitic incidents, from bomb threats and cemetery desecration to assaults and bullying, have surged in the United States since the election of President Donald Trump, and a "heightened political atmosphere" played a role in the rise, the Anti-Defamation League said on April 24.
The people writing, preaching, and claiming to know how to interpret "the" truth were almost entirely cisgender heterosexual white men in positions of authority in religious communities.
The suspect, James Harris Jackson, told police he traveled to New York with the intent to attack black men, according to the New York Times. The Times quoted Assistant Chief William Aubry describing Jackson as having "harbored a hatred of black men for more than a decade." Officials have expressed desire to classify the charge to a hate crime.
Image via JP Keenan/ Sojourners
America is beautiful because we have the power to define what it means to be American.
Too often, we immigrants define what is "American" by what white culture tells us it should be. We internalize colonialism and let it run thickly in our veins: We give our offspring English names because we’re embarrassed of our language, or afraid that our children won’t be accepted with anything too “exotic.” We eagerly give up a culture that so proudly raised us. I’ve watched as we villainize black people and turn our backs on undocumented immigrants.
Image via RNS/Reuters/Randall Hill
Around them, the air cracked with gunfire, Sanders told a jury on Dec. 7.
“There was so many shots,” Sanders testified in the federal government’s case against Dylann Roof, on trial for killing nine congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015. “There was so many shots.”
Steve Bannon. Photo by Don Irvine, via Flickr.com
A group of African-American clergy have issued an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump, urging him to “reconsider this appointment especially as you step into your role as President in a nation struggling to move past a deeply divisive campaign.”
The letter, organized by National African American Clergy Network co-chairs Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, Dr. T. DeWitt Jr., and Dr. Otis Moss Jr., came before the announcements today of Sen. Jeff Sessions to Attorney General.
Image via RNS/Reuters/Sandy Huffaker
The high school I went to, on Long Island, taught me a lot about race. I learned about overt racism, and what we now call microaggressions.
Over a quarter of a century later, I am under no delusions that we live in a post-racial society.
Image via 'The Birth of a Nation'/Facebook
An early scene in Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation depicts the wedding of two slaves. As the bride and groom dance joyfully with each other in the midst of a circle of their fellow slaves, the group around them sings: “You got a right, you got a right, you got a right to the tree of life.”
Several scenes later, Nina Simone’s Strange Fruit plays as the camera pans out slowly to show a massive live oak tree full of lynched black bodies. It’s a nauseating image, and the two scenes draw a heartbreaking connection: In this world, oppressed people claiming their right to the tree of life can be a death sentence.
Image via vincenzo mancuso/Shutterstock.com
I don’t need to remind you, but I will, that this is the mentality of slave owners — the muscle memory of oppression that beats in American hearts still, in quiet and loud ways, and leads the systems of this nation to marginalize those who look different than the most privileged.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on MSNBC.
The Republican National Convention got underway July 18, and those who were anticipating drama did not have to wait long.
Even before the official start of the convention, Stephen Colbert stole the stage to announce the commencement of the “Republican National Hungry for Power Games” while imitating a character from the dystopian novels and movies, The Hunger Games.
Best known for his role in "Grey's Anatomy," Williams stole the show on a night featuring a surprise performance by Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar.
Photo via REUTERS / Randall Hill / RNS
I cannot think of a better way to honor the victims of the Charleston massacre, and the Jesus they worship, than by insisting on another form of justice for Roof.
Glen Stassen. Danske Kirkedage / Flickr.com
I knew that the problem of race in America was one of the two main engines that mobilized his project in Christian ethics. The other was the threat of war. In the 1980s, Glen put together a method of doing Christian ethics in the context of the Cold War that was meant to help foster clarity in conversation and allow unspoken influential preferences to be recognized. As he understood it, we are much more than reasoning, rational minds; we are a complex amalgam of different contributing factors, including our core convictions, community loyalties, things we are passionate about, people we trust, and political commitments. Indeed, many things are at play in all of our ethical decisions.
New initiatives are seeking to curb what is often portrayed as a growing epidemic of heroin use in America. But as Ekow Yankah wrote in a brilliant piece last month, titled “When Addiction Has a White Face" this new attention to the plight of the addicted and the justification from law enforcement that “these are people with a purpose in life” has only come when the faces of addicts are no longer black and brown, but white.
Image via Twitter
Did you know that Oregon was founded as place for white people only?
Yes. Yes, it was.
In a complicated twisting political tale of pre-Civil War American history, enshrined in my state’s constitution were explicit and clear black exclusion laws.