Finding Identity-Thinking Ethnically

I have trouble dealing with ethnicity. It isn’t that I have trouble dealing with people who have an ethnicity. No, my problem, like that of very many of us, is that Anglo-Americans have generally grown up without any ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that the American Myth is that the only identity or ethnicity [...]

We’re all Users

I’m reading Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s Come on People: on the path from Victims to Victors. On p. 32 they write:
One way slaves survived such brutal conditions was to turn the Christianity they had learned into a liberation theology.  The stories of the Hebrew slaves became their own. Even as slave owners used the [...]

Racist? You tell me.

The person sharing a devotional was telling a story about a person whose presence had scared him.  Included in the description was that the “man was big and black.”
Since the audience for this devotional was 98% anglo, identifying the man as black had the intended effect.  I paid attention through the rest of the story [...]

You have to be Rich to be Poor

If you think the poor just need to work harder, this fine article by DeNeen L. Brown shows many ways that the poor have to work harder just to keep up, let alone to try and get ahead.  HT Alan Hitt.
Here’s the opening:
You have to be rich to be poor.
That’s what some people who have [...]

Warning: Partisan Post(?)

I received this via email:
How Racism Works
What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating
class?
What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said ‘I do’
to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his [...]

40

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride
-U2 Pride (In the Name of Love), 1984
40 years ago this morning, MLK Jr. was shot and killed.  Leonard Pitts has an excellent piece about this anniversary that appeared in this morning’s Waco Trib.
Among other [...]

My Weekend

Here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend:

Visit Central High School (Little Rock, Arkansas) visitor center.
National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN (450 Mulberry)
Worship at Ebenezer Baptist Church
Visit King Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Visit the National Voting Rights Museum, Selma
Walk the Edmund Pettis Bridge

Reverse the Curse

Today’s lectionary readings include both Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2. Actually, Textweek lists the two as options in the place of the Old Testament text; though only the Acts passage is differentiated in the denominational breakdown.
I think it is very insightful to read the Pentecost story in light of the Tower of Babel [...]

A Timely Piece

Clocks are everywhere around us. Many of us live by them to an unhealthy degree. Some of us need to live by them a bit more faithfully. Either way, we don’t escape them. Moving Daylight Savings Time up a couple weeks was supposed to have caused a fuss, but the world [...]

The topic that never dies (but should)

 A young man come by my office last week to talk about “reverse racism.” He doesn’t like it when he, as a white guy, is discriminated against.
But who does?  No one likes it, no one deserves it.  Jesus calls us as the people of God to treat everyone with love and respect as we would have God treat [...]