Category: justice
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Why does murder matter more in Colorado than Chicago?
The Colorado movie theater shooting was tragic and has rightly received significant media focus. Twelve lives lost is twelve too many. Given the amount of media attention devoted to this tragedy it might seem that murder on this scale is unique but, as Murtaza Hussain in Salon points out, it’s not. [As] heinous as the…
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Experience Matters
Another article I wrote for the Undocumented blog has now been posted. “Many church members are too afraid to come to church anymore.” I was attending a meeting of ministry leaders when the well-respected Hispanic pastor stood to share. He told us how the police had begun parking near their church building on Sunday mornings,…
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Trayvon, Dr. Land, & the “Myth” of Racism
My latest article for Leadership Journal’s blog has been posted. On an unseasonably warm Saturday in late March, my 3-year-old son and I took the train from our Chicago neighborhood to a rally downtown for Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African American teenager who was killed in Florida a month earlier. The protest itself was predictable:…
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The Los Angeles Riots
Los Angeles burned while I was in ninth grade. Less than a year earlier my family had left a decade of life in South America for our new home just 60 miles from that sprawling and simmering city that would soon explode. Tomorrow marks twenty years since the riots began, ignited by the acquittal of…
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The New Jim Crow, Chapter 5
Richard Johnson and I are blogging our way through The New Jim Crow. We’re rotating between chapters, posting reflections and the questions this important book is raising for us. Check out our posts on chapters one, two, three, and four. This is my final contribution; Richard will wrap things up with his thoughts on chapter…
David W. Swanson 