In all seriousness, as if the United States skipped abolition, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, and the last four decades of Reconstruction Part Deux, American Christians are debating whether White supremacists are the new outsider whom they’re compelled by grace to welcome. It’s an odd scenario to represent as merely hypothetical when one […]
Without reservation
Student leaders at Pacific Union College (PUC) have published a remarkable statement affirming the diversity within their campus’ student body. The undated statement, signed by twenty students who consider themselves “representatives of the future generations of leaders in the Seventh-day Adventist church,” commits them to standing on campus and in their communities with women, LGBT+ […]
Blood on the bench
The story of the Arkansas 8 dominated Easter weekend. Several men have been sentenced to die in Arkansas this month, and the governor of AR, “concerned” about the viability of the execution drugs, rush-scheduled a series of executions. Campaigners rallied to stop them, and have so far managed to hold off four. But one of […]
Hope and realism
The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” —Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, via James Cone Niebuhr wrote wrote this statement 25-30 years before the height of the civil rights movement. It suggests a clarity about US race relations […]
Good news for VA voters?
Depending on who you listen to, today the Supreme Court either ruled against racist gerrymandering or decided that it’s sometimes ok. Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, seems to think there’s good news in the result. The case they’re referring to is Bethune-Hill et al. v. Virginia State Board of Elections et al. and SCOTUS released its […]
News from Michigan, Alabama, and Russia
A common thread of resistance and environmental racism links Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and Waller County, Texas, where residents are fighting, respectively, state negligence, corporate encroachment, and an unwanted landfill. Phillip Luke Sintierre writes on the proposed landfill in Waller County for the African American Intellectual History Society: Opposition to Green Group’s […]
