Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/ibrahimsundiata/)
The Charleston Massacre unleashed a torrent of questions about the true nature of “The Lost Cause.” Across the country we are coming to acknowledge the “Stars and Bars” as not only a symbol of the slavocracy, but also one of continuing opposition to social progress.
Dolezal may be personally mendacious and manipulative, but her construction of herself, however contrived, struck a raw nerve in the American psyche. The “white” woman turned ‘black” is even more transgressive than transgenders. Her professed bisexuality attracts less attention than her racial identification.
In an age of identity politics can we criticize the formerly colonized or semi-colonized “Two-Thirds World” (in the faculty letter’s terminology)? How to address female genital mutilation in Somalia, slavery in Mauritania and the lynching of gays in Kenya? Especially when such occurrences are clothed with the authority of religion, how do we respond?
I urge the pastors and bishops of my own Methodist denomination in Africa and elsewhere (as well as all right-thinking people) to sign a covenant condemning, at minimum, the extra-judicial murder of persons on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Without this, we are indeed hopelessly divided, not only on what it means to be a religious person, but also on what it means to be human. We are not animals.
The “funeralizing” of Nelson Mandela has ended. It was part MLK Day, part rock concert. Pundits, starlets and TV personalities fought for air-time to proclaim their nearness to the departed leader. But, for some of us who marched outside the Chicago consulate of apartheid South Africa in the dead of winter in years gone by, Mandela is more.