Racism Defies the “Greatest Commandment”

Posted on July 30, 2015 by ETW

Eric Thomas Weber, first published on The Second Breakdown, July 30, 2015.

In July 2015, University of Mississippi graduate, Adebanke Alabi invited me to comment on race and the Church for a series on her blog. The following is my piece, originally published on her page and reposted here with permission.

Preface: I am grateful to Adebanke (Buki) Alabi for calling me to comment on race and Christianity for the readers of her blog, The Second Breakdown: My Thoughts on Jesus and His Church.

Mississippi is still home to obstinate racism, even while in 2014 Gallup found it to be the most religious state in the United States. The vast majority of the 44 failing school districts’ enrollments in the state are majority- to almost totally made up of African American students. Some districts have been accused of not having desegregated. We have seen symbolic racism at the University of Mississippi, as well as troubling direct confrontations. Some young people planned and executed a racially motivated murder a few years ago in Jackson, MS.

Despite all of these disturbing cases of racism in Mississippi, many citizens and public officials continue to resist change even to symbols of racism. I have argued that falsely romanticizing heritage does us harm and that symbols, like the Confederate Battle Flag featured in the canton of MS’s state flag, contribute to the perpetuation of racism and injustice. What has gotten very little attention is the tragic inconsistency between the religious beliefs people say that they hold dear and the contradictory behaviors that we see here in Mississippi.

In a passage from the Republic, Plato’s Socrates tells us that leaders must convince their people that we are all born of the earth, children of the same parent – a mother, according to the story. When threats to security arise, if people do not care sufficiently about their neighbors, they will fail to act in others’ defense. Kinship motivates us to take care of our children and our brothers and sisters. People thinking of each other as kin is one of the most important needs for a society’s safety and unity, he argues. He thought the story was a lie, but a necessary one. Christians today do not think it is a lie, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory confirms humanity’s common kinship.

Plato lived about 400 years before Christ. When we look to the Christian religion, we see a related social aim to the kinship that Socrates called for. A basic Christian belief is that human beings are all children of the same parent – in this case, a Father. One might think that the belief that we are all brothers and sisters would motivate Christians to treat others accordingly.

People are very good at finding ways around what they ought to do, however. Some people divide humanity into categories of those who are fallen and those who are elect or saved. If there are children of God in one community, what do we call people from another community or belief system? Galatians 3:26 explains that people are all children of God in their shared faith in Christ. If that is true, does that mean that nonbelievers or those who profess different faiths are not children of God? That is not logically necessary: “All things red have color” doesn’t imply that other things don’t also have color.

Many Christians treat others in ways that are not neighborly, even in deeply religious places. The tragedy of this fact is that people in Mississippi share many religious beliefs – that we are all children of the same Father. In their faith in Christ, Scripture says, they should all see each other as children of God.

For many, the core of the Christian religion can be distilled, as Jesus is said to have done in Matthew 22:35-40, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28, into the Greatest Commandment, which has two parts. In addition to loving God, the first element, which people proclaim in word so commonly, Jesus calls for loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. This second element is far less often extolled in word, and evidence in deeds illustrates blatant defiance of the commandment.

It is time to call people out on this gross contradiction. How in a place like Mississippi people can resist symbolic change, let alone progress in deeds, even with respect to a symbol of the state’s defense of slavery, while claiming to be Christians, is deeply distressing. Some public figures recognize this and have courageously called for progress. It is time others who profess their faith own up to what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Dr. Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of four books, including Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South (forthcoming in September 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter @erictweber.

Gender in an Ideal World

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve had some great discussions following my post on Feminism and the Transgender Community.

The topic has stuck with me as I’ve reflected more on this simmering rift between progressive communities.

The good news, as some have pointed out, is that younger cis women tend to be more welcoming of their transgender peers than those who came of age in earlier waves of feminism. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are still plenty of feminists who actively disparage and discriminate against transgender men and women.

That doesn’t sit well with me. That doesn’t sit well with me at all. It strikes me as deeply unjust that women who would proclaim themselves as advocates for equity would discriminate so intentionally.

Not that this is a new or unique issue. There have long been tensions between the white feminist community and the feminist communities of people of color, for example. But those topics deserve their own post.

Today, I’d like to think about what gender or gender identity might look like in an ideal world. There are many tensions between feminists and transgender communities, to be sure, but I think this might be one of them.

Both groups may share a view that gender expression as its normalized now is stifling, but I wonder if there’s a subtle but important difference deeper in these views.

Imagine first a feminist utopia: people do whatever they’re interested in and are respected for whoever they are. There may be some functional differences to restrooms, but overall gender is not a “thing” that defines us.

You may even be inclined to envision this a little more radically: seeing a society where gender is not a binary, but a spectrum encompassing a rich diversity of thoughts, feelings, looks, and expressions.

Now ask yourself: would there be transgender people in such a society?

This is where we start to get into trouble. I think – and I may be entirely wrong about this – that there is a certain flavor of feminist who would be inclined to imagine that “transgender” would be obsolete in such society.

If you are truly free to express yourself regardless of your gender, how can your assigned gender be “wrong”?

There’s a reasonable logic to that argument and a certain comforting simplicity.

But it also has some disconcerting undertones. It implies that transgender people are only a temporary element of society – that “transgender” is not a real thing, but rather a response to a paternalistic paradigm.

Under this model, you may be willing to accept a transgender person as choosing to express their gender a certain way as a means of survival.

It’s not unlike accepting the person who wishes public schools were better, but still elects to send their children to private school: they have to play into the system to make the right choice for themselves, but ultimately the act is a symbol of a broken system.

But what if we were to imagine that yes, there would be transgender people in a more gender fluid society?

Suddenly, the valuation of transgender people seems to change. They aren’t just playing a broken system instead of trying to change the rules. They are genuinely trying to express themselves, express who they are in a meaningful, ineffable way.

As a cis person myself, I don’t really know what that means. But the more I talk to transgender people, the more I hear their stories of discovery and transition, the more I’m convinced that being transgender is more complex and more deeply rooted than our society’s broken gender norms.

That our existing gender system is broken certainly complicates matters – creating false ideas of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine.” But even if we were to do away with those tired tropes, I don’t think that the identity of transgender would just wash away.

Being transgender is something deeper than that, something more fundamental to a person’s being, something which we as a collective society are only beginning to understand.

Reflections on Northern Racism

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

The Black Lives Matter protests that shut down two democratic candidates’ speeches at Netroots Nation highlights an emerging topic of the conversation around race.

While white southerners are arguing against the idea that racism is all Dixie’s fault, white northerners are being confronted with the troubling idea that they, too, might be part of the problem.

To be clear about my own identity, I am a white person born and raised in California. I’m fairly sure that makes me neither a Yankee nor a southerner, though California officially supported the north in the civil war. I have lived my entire adult life in Massachusetts.

I have spent very little time in the south, though thanks to my father – who grew up in 1940s Florida – I ate a lot of grits growing up.

All of that is to say that I am in no position to judge the south. Certainly recent events – such as our nation’s president being greeted by Confederate flag wavers in Oklahoma – indicates that there is important work to be done around racism in the south. But that’s hardly enough to write off the entire south, and only the south, as our nation’s problem.

I am also struck by the reflections of John Gaventa, exploring white powerlessness and poverty in Appalachia: “Programmes which present people like those of [Appalachia] do so usually as stereotypes of passive, quaint or backwards characters…What a society sees of itself on television may provide its mainstream with a kind of collective self-image, by which individuals and sub-groups evaluate themselves and others…the lack of coverage of a subordinate group keeps the members of the group isolated from one another, unaware that others similarly situated share common concerns or are pursuing challenges upon common issues.”

All of that is to say: stereotypes of white, racist southerners help nobody.

The south should indeed confront its racist past and present, but it is wrong to scapegoat the south as the home of all our nation’s racism.

Northern racism – or liberal racism or progressive racism, if you prefer – is just as real. It is somehow more proper, a fine veneer of inclusion over a troubling racist interior.

This northern racism is arguably more insidious: a norther says the right things and goes through the right motions. But all the while, the system pushes to ensure segregation and white dominance.

Historically, this has put white northerners in an enviable position of avoiding fault: They wanted the meeting to be inclusive, its just that only white people showed up. The dutiful liberal heaves a sigh. What could be done?

The reaction to the interruptions of Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders at Netroots reminds me of this type of liberalism.

As one reporter noted, “I, like many of the others there, was initially irritated by the protestors. I was there to hear the candidates and was frustrated that they weren’t being heard. Even a bit angry, in fact. “These are your allies,” I thought. “Why on earth are you attacking them? Why are you disrupting an event where the people there are sympathetic to your cause?””

That is the response of the white liberal. Sympathetic to the cause, but not to the method. Wanting there to be a chance, but not willing to work for it.

The author eventually reflected on his own experience of being silenced in that moment – emotions “felt acutely and painfully every single day by racial minority groups in our country.”

Yes, indeed, being silenced is frustrating.

But all is not lost for us well-meaning, white liberals who genuinely want to do more than sigh and blame the system. Paulo Freire proposes a path beyond liberalism – to radicalism:

Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly. This conversion is so radical as not to allow of ambiguous behavior. To affirm this commitment but to consider oneself the proprietor of revolutionary wisdom – which must then be given to (or imposed on) the people – is to retain the old ways. The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his “status,” remains nostalgic towards his origins.

Feminism and the Transgender Community

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been deeply struck recently by the narratives I’ve heard from some feminists about transgender people. There is a disconnect, or a tension, it seems, between certain conceptions of feminism and a full embrace of transgender people.

Among many older feminists, for example, there seems to be a general confusion about transgender identities and, perhaps, a too-eager willingness to dismiss those identities.

I mention age here not to imply that older people’s idea are inherently out of date or old-fashioned – this isn’t like when everybody rolls their eyes at the kind-of-racist thing your grandparent just said.

Rather – the women I’m thinking of are deep, liberal, radical feminists. Their age is important because they fought on the front lines of sexual liberation. They’ve personally felt that glass ceiling pushing them down. They know what it’s like to be sexually harassed and discriminated against as part of institutions that didn’t even put up the appearance of condemning such behavior.

They knew the first women in their families who were allowed to vote.

These women have been leaders in the battle not only only for women’s rights and equality, but for women’s freedom of self-expression.

Being a woman, they’ve rightly argued, is no single thing. There is no perfect body type. No thing you must enjoy or activities you must hate. It’s not clothes or hair, attitude or aptitude that define femininity.

In this way, the women’s movement isn’t just about the right to be treated equally, it’s about the right to be ourselves.

This concept runs into challenges with the transgender movement which – correctly or not – is often interpreted as arguing that, for example, a transgender woman is someone who feels like a woman.

A radical feminist doesn’t know what that means.

How can someone “feel like a woman” when womanhood itself is something that eludes definition?

This approach interprets transgender men and women as people who are simply conforming to the gender binary: transgender men were assigned female at birth but were too macho to be stereotypical women. Transgender women liked princesses too much to live by their assigned gender of male.

And while I am not at all convinced that the above interpretation of transgender people is accurate, it does create tension between the two communities as feminists bemoan the reinforcement of gender norms and see people of privilege – those assigned male at birth – claim the title of womanhood.I don’t know the way out of this tension. I have no idea what it feels like to be a gender other than the one I was assigned to at birth, but I have to trust people when they tell me that’s who they are. For me, that is enough. But as a society I think we need something more.

This conflict is particularly tragic because there should be no greater allies to the transgender community than feminists. There should be no one better able to appreciate the struggle of being unable to genuinely be yourself.

In many ways, that is, we are all in the same fight – all struggling to find and be our true selves.

Power Creates Power

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I recently finished John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley.

The book is an in depth case study of one coal mining community. Gaventa documents how people had their land taken out from under them over 100 years ago by a huge, multinational company. He details the development of power structures separating the working poor, the local elite, and the absentee Company.

He illustrates how the very institutions intended to protect and support “the people” were turned against them: how Company power over workers’ jobs, home, and welfare led to power over their private ballots. How the union became so corrupted its leaders turned to murder rather than suffer a challenger who was slightly more populist. How those in power took both significant and subtle actions to maintain power, while those without power learned better than to even think of questioning authority.

Gaventa, who for years led the Highlander Center, sums up his study eloquently in his conclusion:

Continual defeat gives rise not only to the conscious deferral of action but also to a sense of defeat, or a sense of powerlessness, that may affect the consciousness of potential challengers about grievances, strategies or possibilities for change. Participation denied over time may lead to acceptance of the role of non-participation, as well as to a failure to develop the political resources – skills, organization, consciousness – of political action. Power relationships may develop routines of non-challenge which require no particular action on the part of powerholders to be maintained…

From this perspective, the total impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts. Power serves to create power. Powerlessness serves to re-enforce powerlessness. Power relationships, once established, are self-sustaining. Quiescence [inaction] in the face of inequalities may be understood only in terms of the inertia of the situation. For this reason, power in a given community can never be understood simply by observation at a given point in time. Historical investigation must occur to discover whether routines of non-conflict have been shaped, and, if so, how they are maintained.

This last point is particularly critical – too often we forget that the “impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts.” We forget that these relationships are self-sustaining, with power creating power and powerlessness creating powerlessness.

The result is that we all find ourselves caught in a power structure not of our own making. We may consciously or unconsciously act in ways which reinforce or resist that structure. We may or may not even recognize a power structure is there.

Paulo Freire recognized this, too, arguing in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.

That is to say, we are all caught in this power structure, but it is only the oppressed who can save us.

Agency

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Social psychologist Geert Hofstede is perhaps most well known for his construction of cultural dimensions. Hofstede considers culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Among his six dimensions of culture, Hofstede evaluates a society’s “Individualism versus Collectivism (IDV).” Hofstede explains:

The fundamental issue addressed by this dimension is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It has to do with whether people´s self-image is defined in terms of “I” or “We”. In Individualist societies people are only supposed to look after themselves and their direct family. In Collectivist societies people belong to “in groups” that take care of them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

The United States, as conventional wisdom would indicate, is more individualistic than collectivist.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, because in some ways that finding seems at odds with the lack of agency experienced by so many Americans – particularly people of color, those living in poverty, and others who are marginalized in our society.

As Kelly Oliver argues in The Colonization of Psychic Space: “One’s sense of oneself as a subject with agency is profoundly affected by one’s social position.”

Being an individualistic society, then, puts oppressed people in a double-bind. While Hofstede finds that American society expects “that people look after themselves and their immediate families only and should not rely (too much) on authorities for support,” the message to oppressed people consistently undermines their own sense of agency and self-efficacy.

Frankly, I was always somewhat skeptical of Hofstede’s anaylsis, and not only because he also has a masculinity/femininity scale defined as “wanting to be the best (Masculine) or liking what you do (Feminine).”

But the idea of America as an individualistic place, where everyone’s expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…that just sounds like the line you’d get out of the ol’ boys network.

Surely, that has long been an element of our culture, and has often been a strongly expressed element of our culture, but it doesn’t speak for all of us and it doesn’t speak for me.

Oliver argues that “by resisting oppression, one regains a sense of oneself as an agent,” and that the process of resistance can be healing insofar as it can help build agency.

So let’s all, collectively, reject the narrative of an individualistic America. Let us collectively lift each other up and work together to change the dominant narrative. This is our country and we can shape it.

Happy Fourth of July.

Voting is Not Enough

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

In the last presidential election, only 61.8 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. Unsurprisingly, the 2014 midterms were even worse, with just 36.4 percent of eligible citizens voting – the worst turnout in any election cycle since World War II.

Those are the kind of numbers which make civic advocates despair.

The Editorial Board of the New York Times reported that the low turnout “was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy.” The Times went on to bemoan the causes of the record-low turnout: “apathy, anger and frustration at the relentlessly negative tone of the campaigns.”

But we should be wary of correlating increased voter turnout with increased civic health – voting is an important act in a healthy democracy, but a turn out rate is not enough to diagnose a civic ailment.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa develops a power-powerlessness model of voting.

In a coal mining valley of Appalachia, Gaventa is struck by how local elections are always battles between elites which never address or engage the poor, working people of the community:

Though intensely fought, the conflict which emerges into the local political arena is rarely substantive compared with what could emerge. The candidates do not raise questions potentially challenging to either Company or courthouse – such as why the locally derived wealth is not redistributed through taxation.

Gaventa documents how both public and private (eg, voting) challenges to existing power structures are forcefully shut down by those in power. Over time, these power structures become stronger and the fear of reprisal becomes ingrained. Those without power exhibit repeated behavior which would be perplexing to an outsider.

In one Company town, turnout rates would get as high as 100%. Voting day was a special day, where folks would dress up to participate. Then they’d go to to the ballot box and vote unanimously for the company man – a man who was actively engaged in the oppression of the people voting for him.

While “a host of studies in political science argue that the poor may not participate or may not participate effectively, because of low income, poor education, lack of information, and other factors of a socio-economic state scale,” Gaventa draws a different conclusion:

Factors such as low income, low education and low status may, in fact, be reflections of a common index of ‘vulnerability’ or social and economic dependency of a non-elite upon an elite. Through processes of coercive power, those most likely to challenge inequalities may be prevented from challenge…Over time, there may develop a routine of non-conflict within and about local politics – a routine which may, to the observer, appear as a fatalism found in ‘backwardness.’ As regards to voting…the phenomenon would be better understood as a product of power relations, such that actions of challenge – and even, over time, conceptions of such actions – by the powerless against the powerful become organized out the political milieu.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t talk about voting, but voting is far from enough. When we talk about voting, we should talk about power – and not just the desperate claim that one person’s vote has the power to make a difference. We should talk about how structures of power shape our very approach to voting.

In one talk at Frontiers of Democracy last week, Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s Secretary of the State, said that the number one reason people give for not voting is that no one asked them.

While perhaps we shouldn’t feel the need to send an engraved invitation to every member of our democracy inviting them to participate in it, the reality is…we do.

When I see low voting rates, I don’t see a people who are too apathetic or too stupid to vote, I see a people who have been taught – explicitly and implicitly – that they have no agency in this world. That their voices and their thoughts have no value.

And when we talk about voting, too often we reinforce this sense – after all, if one vote out of 3 million is all the power you have…that’s just a reminder of just how powerless you are

On Confederate Flags and the Long Road Ahead

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

In a surprise move, once it became politically expedient, South Carolina’s governor and others added their voices to the call for the Confederate flag to come down from the state house.

With even Walmart and EBay deciding to ban the Confederate flag, it seems like the days of Confederate flag waving might soon be behind us.

And that’s not bad. The Confederate flag has long been a sign of hate. In 1962, at a time of school desegregation and powerful civil rights organizing, it was erected over the South Carolina state house.

A reminder of who was, and who would remain, in power.

Following the murder of nine people in a terrorist attack on Mother Emanuel church, many have wisely decried this symbol, and a growing campaign has organized around it’s removal.

I will be glad if the campaign is successful, and yet, the effort leaves me unsettled –

There is so much work to do, and it goes far, far beyond taking down a flag.

Like a campaign built upon online clicks, the effort to remove the flag feels like little more than slacktivisim – an opportunity for good people to prove they are good before getting back to their every day lives.

Perhaps I paint with too broad a brush here, so perhaps I should only say that that’s how I would feel.

I’ve been told that any good organizing campaign is sustained by little victories, and I can optimistically see how getting a flag taken down might provide such a foothold. Perhaps a victory there will galvanize people to act further – to demand further reforms and to question the deep, pervasive racism that so tragically defines our society.

But the realist in me, imagines a win a signal the caring eyes that have been drawn to issues of racism. Go home, it might say, we’ve won.

Surely, there is a value to accomplishing some simple, tangible victories – but not if those victories signal permission to no longer act, to put off the really difficult work.

And we do have difficult work ahead of us.

Calls for a “national dialogue on race” hardly do the work justice. We need to dismantle and rebuild our systems and institutions, and we need to talk with each other – not just a nation, but as a community of individuals – and we, white people in particular, need to recognize that we’ve got a lot of learning to do.

It’s easy not to engage in conversations about race and racism when you’re the one benefiting from the system, or when you imagine that what others will tell you won’t ring true to your own experience.

White privilege doesn’t mean your life is perfect: it just means that someone else’s is probably worse.

We have real, serious, deep-seated and systemic problems around race in this country. It will take more than a flag to sweep them away.

Searching for Inspiration on Dark Days

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been thinking a lot about actionable steps, recently. Amid the murders in Charleston. Following the deaths of Walter Scott, Kalief Browder, Michael Brown, and far, far too many others.

I’ve read articles on how to be an ally, read commentary and analysis on the perpetual racism pervading our society. I’ve added my voice to those calling for change. I’ve joined mailing lists calling for action, attended protests and demonstrations. I’ve given financially where I can.

And none of it feels like enough. Nothing feels like it’s changing.

I woke this morning with the words of Oscar Wilde ringing in my head:

We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.

I rather wanted to spend the day hiding in my closet sobbing silently at all the ills in the world, but that didn’t seem like it would do anybody much of any good.

Besides, who am I to take the bench when people of color are dying? Not everyone has the privileged to just look away.

As I am wont to do at such times of despair, I re-read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I generally suspect that I’m the only one who finds the words of Camus a comfort. Who, after all, likes to imagine that “the workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd” than the fate of Sisyphus. The man who defied the gods and was pushed to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain.

Sisyphus, “powerless and rebellious.” (impuissant et révolté)

What an interesting juxtaposition of words!

Sisyphus knew he was powerless and yet he rebelled. The Gods couldn’t punish him, for still, he rebelled.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa examined the role of social power in maintaining the oppression of the poor in the Appalachian Valley.

Gaventa identified what he calls the three dimensions of power.

In the first dimension, A has power over B insofar as A is has more resources or can use more force to coerce B. The first dimension is a fair fight, where one side is stronger than the other.

In the second dimension, A constructs barriers to diminish B’s participation. Voter ID laws, monolingual meetings. In the second dimension, A rigs the game.

The third dimension is the most insidious. Not only does A control and shape the agenda, but A’s power is so absolute that A influences the way B sees the conflict. In the third dimension, B is not even sure she’s oppressed. It’s a woman who just naturally does all the house work.

I sometimes think that the pervasiveness of racism in America stems from Whites’ inability to reach this total level of dominance.

We brought people over as chattel and expected them to obey. We beat them and tortured them and did unspeakable things to break them, but they continued to resist.

We fancied ourselves as gods, and yet among those who were most powerless we found ourselves impotent. Unable to exert total power. Still they rebelled.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

Sisyphus is stronger than his rock.

But I imagine that it’s of little comfort to one who looks back on generations of oppression, who looks around to see their brothers and sisters dying. It’s of little comfort that some dead, French philosopher thinks you’ve won.

Yet there is something in this, I think –

For the battle goes on.

The battle goes on, and slowly bending the arc of the moral universe can feel very much like futile labor, it can feel like an effort in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

But still the work goes on.

For we know that all is not, has not been, exhausted, and we know that fate is a human matter, which must be settled among men.

And there is so much work for us to do.

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Category Archives: Justice

Racism Defies the “Greatest Commandment”

Reflections on Northern Racism

Power Creates Power

Agency