It is amazingly easy to become quietly complicit with the violence of U.S. border policy—even for those whose ancestors once fled violence themselves. How can so many of us live in denial?
2013
Living in the Shadow of SB 1070: Organizing for Migrant Rights in Arizona
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The predatory escalation of immigration enforcement in Arizona has continued to worsen in the wake of Arizona’s 2010 immigration law. In response, migrants have organized Barrio Defense Committees, Freedom Rides of undocumented activists, and more.
2013
Rethinking Immigration With Art
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To reorient this country’s immigration policy toward generosity and compassion will require serious creativity and vision. Let’s look to art for inspiration!
Articles
How to Stand in Solidarity with African Americans This Weekend
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I’m writing to YOU to urge you to either come with me on Sunday or go to a nearer African American church this Sunday and let the African American community in your neighborhood or town know that they are not alone, that we understand their fear and stand in solidarity with them. No matter where you came out on the Zimmerman trial, you can still stand in solidarity with African Americans, support them in their grief, and signal to them that they are not alone.
Articles
Why “Voting Rights, NO, Gay Marriage, YES” from the Supreme Court?
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The Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights reminds us that racism against Blacks remains far more deeply implanted in America’s economic and political institutions, and in the consciousness of many Americans, than the horrendous homophobia that may now be somewhat receding. Yet it is also a testimony to those in the gay world who refused to be “realistic” when told that gay marriage was unthinkable. We need that same kind of unrealistic thinking to revive the necessary struggle against American racism.
Articles
Anti-Muslim Fervor in the Wake of the Boston Marathon Bombings
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More than a month has passed since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but the fear and anti-Muslim fervor generated by the attack continues to ripple through the United States.
Articles
The Natatorium
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But in class all she could see was Jacob, his lithe movements, the panicky heat of his body when she swam beside him and let their legs kick against each other in an ecstasy of splash.
2013
A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California
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One of the most valuable functions of socially conscious art is its power to personalize and humanize what can easily become an abstraction. This power was evident again and again at BAILA con Duende, a recent Los Angeles exhibition featuring the works of seventy-four black artists.
Activism
Stop-and-Frisk in New York and the Politics of Crime in America
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To deny that race and class do not matter in contemporary America and its criminal justice system is to deny the most obvious political, scientific, and moral reality of our society.
2012
Crucifixion and the Blues
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Some say the crucifixion is abhorrent—too bloody, too brutal, too cruel to contemplate. We have to shield our eyes and look away or—as in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ, stare fascinated through our fingers at the spectacle. In either case, we avoid reckoning with the real power of the crucifixion, which is a blues power, a truth-telling power that not only holds a mirror up to the blood, the brutality, the cruelty that is our daily fare, but also opens up a way out of the carnage.
2012
Legacies of the Cross and the Lynching Tree
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The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ-figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched. The evil forces of the Roman State and white supremacy in America willed it. Yet, God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.”
27.4 Fall
On The Obama Question: A Black Womanist Response
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Feminist and black womanist reflection have long held that one’s personal experience always has political and universal implications. In light of this claim, the womanist lens that guides my approach to The Obama Question is especially intrigued by Gary Dorrien’s attempt to debunk and redirect racially politicized assumptions that undergird some progressive and leftist perspectives.
Art
Correcting the Canon: The African American Feminist Art of Meta Fuller
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In 2012, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of exclusion remains huge. Renée Ater’s new book, Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller, goes a long way in correcting the glaring omission of one of the key African-American woman artists of the twentieth century. Learn how Meta Fuller went from making her art in the evenings after finishing her domestic chores to creating one of the most remarkable Pan-African artworks of that era.
Articles
Rick Santorum and Karl Marx: Examining Corporate Liberalism and Reaganomics Through the Lens of Social Stratification
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The current Republican primary campaigns have repeatedly raised class issues, offering an opportunity to examine how the two main competing political ideologies in American politics—defined here as corporate liberalism and Reaganomics—respond to class-consciousness and address class interests.
2012
Learning from Rwanda
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The Rwandan approach makes restorative justice an ongoing multisector process embedded in the realistic realization that post-genocide healing never ends; rather, this healing is the lifelong multigenerational endeavor of people to work through their pains of tragic loss informally through living together.