Can we all just get along? If you were around in the early 1990s, you would remember this challenge posed by Rodney King, a black man who was beaten by police officers in Los Angeles. To quell the riots, perhaps, after the officers were acquitted for their level of inhumanity, King exhorted people to learn …
Continue reading Do We Really Want Reconciliation? Or Are We Just Conflict Averse?
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. - Psalm 139.14, NASB I know that my identity as a black woman is affirmed and validated by the image of God! And I also know that as God began to …
“Show a people as one thing and only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Danger of a Single Story. Dangerous. Crime ridden. Littered with trash and broken glass. Infested with miscreants and human vermin. Falling apart. According to a recent commentary in the Star Tribune, …
In my brief 33 years of living, I have come across many people of all walks and stripes - conservatives, liberals, Christians, agnostic, men, women, rich and poor - who sincerely believe that blacks and other people of color in America are afforded the same opportunities as whites. In their heart of hearts, they sincerely …
Slavery. Convict leasing system. Sharecropping. Jim Crow. Restrictive housing covenants. Redlining. Eugenics. War on Drugs. Vietnam. Mass incarceration. Police brutality. 400 years of continual oppression and marginalization, with no end in sight, has the tendency to create a sense of hopelessness and even nihilism. As the author of Hebrews attests, hope deferred really does make the …
“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” These are the opening words to Ta-Nehisi Coates seminal work, the Case for Reparations, published in the Atlantic in …
Ebony Johanna 