Quotes
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“The bonus of being white in Ferguson…”
The bonus of being white in Ferguson meant nigh-immunity from plunder. The bane of being black in Ferguson meant nigh-inevitable subjugation under plunder. Plunder is neither abstract nor theoretical. Plunder injures, maims, and destroys. Indeed the very same people who were calling on protestors to remain nonviolent were, every hour, partner to brutality committed under…
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“America’s heritage is kleptocracy…”
“I’m not the president of black America,” Barack Obama has said. “I’m the president of the United States of America.” Precisely. And the President of the United States is not just an enactor of policy for today, he is the titular representative of his country’s heritage and legacy. In regards to black people, America’s heritage…
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Everything I Know about Racism I Learned in the Church
During college, I volunteered for the youth ministry at a church. Every year at the volunteer Christmas party, the two white guys who worked for the ministry dressed up as “black guys from the hood” and performed an entirely unoriginal and unfunny skit that exploited negative black male stereotypes for laughs. I remember looking around the room…
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“…we need painters and novelists and dancers…”
We don’t just need teachers and preachers and scholars and “doctors” of the church to tell us what do do; if the gospel is going to capture imaginations and sanctify perceptions we need painters and novelists and dancers and songwriters and sculptors and poets and designers whose creative work shows the world otherwise, enabling us to imagine…
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“…the wounds of Christ and the wounds of man.”
How many loves fail because, in an unconscious effort to make our weaknesses more strong, we link with others precisely at those points? How many women who are not mothers spend years mothering some mysteriously wounded man? How many apparently strong and successful men seek out love like a kind of topical balm they can apply to…
David W. Swanson 