Smart people saying smart things (9.16)

Smart people saying smart things (9.16) September 16, 2014

Jane Van Galen, “What Is It That I Want?”

I know what I do not want:  Narratives in which the wealthy are held up as model parents who upon hearing of the dangers of the modern world, “go right out” to provide acres of weekend woods for their children; narratives that invite us to admire their paint colors and beautiful windows and solid black granite bathtub without asking too many questions about how it is that relatively young parents can ensure that their child has access to acres of his own private salamanders, and especially not to ask too many questions about how all children might have room to grow and thrive.

Armstrong

Drew G.I. Hart, “Beyond a white privilege model”

Since Jesus’ Kingdom centralized those who have been marginalized and oppressed, the Church must follow that lead. Christians from dominant culture can no longer follow the lead of mainstream and popular Christianity. Instead, they must find Jesus among the least of these, and follow after him. Dominant culture’s portrayal of Jesus will always be domesticated, sometimes looking like Uncle Sam, a good citizen, or often just a glimpse of the person we see in the mirror every day. The Americanized and assimilated Jesus must be rejected for the Jesus that brought good news to the poor and came to liberate the oppressed. This will only be found by dropping everything, and immediately following Jesus into solidarity with the oppressed. That is, our lives must no longer be aligned with the white hegemonic social order, and must be grounded among the most vulnerable of society, including those that have been historically oppressed by race, class, or gender in America. Jesus’ reign is made visible when the oppressed are privileged at the table of Christ, and where oppressors have repented of their way of life and joined in Christ’s vulnerability in a world that can’t recognize him. It is a new solidarity of being with ‘the little ones’ and allowing them to help reteach what it means to be made in the image of God.

Emily Bazelon, “Why I Don’t Call the Police”

In covering the law, I’ve had more chances than I want to remember to watch these patterns play out in people’s lives. It’s become pretty much a given for me that if the criminal justice system gets a hold of a black person, especially if he is poor, there is a terrible, heightened risk that it will try to crush him. I know we need law enforcement. I know most cops are good people who are trying to do their jobs. But the police have so much power. And often, they are not made to answer when they abuse it — even when, as it appears in Garner’s case, they broke their own rules.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation”

The colored people of America are coming to face the fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood. This does not mean all Americans. A saving few are worried about the Negro problem; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion. The great mass of Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise.

For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders that this attitude was the insensibility of ignorance and inexperience, that white America did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro. Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.


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