Check out these recent articles from around the web:
It’s Not Enough to Preach Racial Justice. We Need to Champion Policy Change. by Esau McCaulley: “As pastors, teachers, and Christian leaders who participate in America’s public square, we don’t remember King rightly by pulling a few disconnected words about justice out of context and plastering them all over social media. We remember him rightly by taking an honest assessment of ourselves as a country. This involves both lauding the progress and looking toward the future. And it involves a robust commitment to understanding the link between injustice and economic disenfranchisement.”
The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism by Mark Lawrence Schrad: “America’s most vocal prohibitionists weren’t privileged white evangelicals, but its most marginalized and disenfranchised communities: women, Native Americans and African Americans. Indeed, temperance and prohibitionism worked hand-in-glove with other freedom movements—abolitionism and suffragism—that fought against the entrenched system of domination and subordination. Consequently, nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It by Clint Smith: “Recently, I’ve become convinced of the need for a large-scale effort to document the lives of people who lived through America’s southern apartheid; who left the land their families had lived on for generations to make the Great Migration to the North and West; who were told they were second-class citizens and then lived to see a person who looked like them ascend to the highest office in the land. Their stories exist in our living rooms, on our front porches, and on the lips of people we know and love. But too many of these stories remain untold, in many cases because no one has asked.”
‘The Separate and Unequal Health System’ Highlighted By COVID-19 by Leila Fadel: “But at this hospital in Willowbrook, an unincorporated part of South L.A. neighboring Compton and Watts, the pandemic is preying on the inequities that disproportionately hurt Latino and Black communities. The neighborhoods are densely populated and multiple generations of families live together, making it hard to isolate. It’s a place where most people are on public health insurance and where chronic illnesses are much more prevalent because there is a systemic lack of access to quality health care. Add COVID-19 to that mix and it’s a deadly but predictable disaster.”
Why every Catholic should make a pilgrimage to Elmina Castle in Ghana by Shannen Dee Williams: “For more than 300 years, hundreds of thousands of kidnapped and enslaved Africans traveled through Elmina on their way to America’s slave societies. At the height of the slave trade, approximately 30,000 enslaved Africans passed through Elmina annually where they encountered a host of European traders, priests, soldiers and families who denied their humanity and subjected them to unspeakable acts of trauma and violence.”
The Magazine That Helped 1920s Kids Navigate Racism by Anna Holmes: “The express purpose of The Brownies’ Book was to show children that being Black is normal in a world determined to convince them that it was not. But to say that Black childhood was normal was not to say that it was the same as white childhood.”
A hole in the heart of antiracism training by Chloé Valdary: “To transform external, systemic structures that teem with racism, what is needed is for folks to see the whole human being with all of her complexities, idiosyncrasies, and intricacies.”
