A Threat to All of Us

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

From D’Shaun L. Harrison, the executive director of Scalawag

Last week, federal authorities arrested two black journalists—Georgia Fort of BLK Press Alerts (above) and independent journalist Don Lemon—for their role in documenting anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis as members of the media.

These arrests are an assault on and a threat to all of us. When the state simultaneously defunds public and independent media while arresting journalists for covering demonstrations against state actors, we should all be alarmed. These are core tactics employed by fascist governments to eliminate accountability and control what our communities know and understand about what’s happening around them. This is fascism in practice, not as a buzzword, and we must be unflinching in our stance against it. As members of the Movement Media Alliance, we endorse and amplify the MMA’s assessment: It is not illegal to record and report on what people in power want to keep hidden.

Ida B. Wells, whose work and words guide so much of what we do here at Scalawag, reminds us that “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” and she understood that silence enables the very injustice we hold in contempt. Independent journalism is essential to the maintenance of democracy, and as such, defending it in the midst of increasing authoritarianism becomes even more vital. Journalists and media-makers who are invested in the wellbeing of our communities have to remain committed to telling the truth.

We need to turn the light of truth on these injustices, exposing them for exactly what they are. We need you to join us in declaring that journalism must not be criminalized. Movement media must be protected. As MMA aptly observed: If we let the government arrest journalists for covering a protest today, it can silence any movement tomorrow.

Handcuffed to its Own Violence

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From Palestinian-American author Hala Alyan, re-posted from her Substack wall.

in gaza or el fasher or tehran or minneapolis, power repeats the same tools everywhere: surveillance, censorship, raids, checkpoints, dehumanization, executions. it reads the world as inventory: people/land/language are line items to be secured, taxed, weaponized. because it cannot imagine a way to sustain itself without force, it will always remain handcuffed to its own violence. it knows no other vernacular and heeds no other god.

This Generation’s Frontline in the Struggle

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By Ariel Gold

In 1965, as excessive state violence was being unleashed against the Black citizens in Selma, Alabama, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent out a nationwide call to faith leaders: “The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.” 

Dr. King’s call for others to join him in leading a march to Montgomery was answered by clergy from across the country, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Sixty-six years later, in the same spirit and with the same clarity as King’s 1965 call, clergy in Minneapolis asked faith activists from across the country to join them in praying with their feet against the atrocities being committed by Immigration Customs and Enforcement against the good people of their state.

Upon hearing that my presence might be helpful, I immediately packed my tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), and on behalf of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, I jumped on an airplane. Arriving in Minneapolis on Thursday, here’s what I witnessed: 

Images of Luis Ramos, a terrified and bewildered five-year-old in a tiny plaid coat and blue knit bunny hat, were dominating local media coverage. Coming home from school, just steps away from his front door, ICE agents took Luis from his father’s car, using him as bait to lure his pregnant mother out of their home. 

By the time I arrived in Minneapolis, only two days later, Luis and his father had already been whisked away to a detention facility in Texas. 

Continue reading “This Generation’s Frontline in the Struggle” →

Our Oil-Future: Keep Pulling It Up, Or Learn to Pour It Down?

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By Jim Perkinson

Christianity is a tradition of oil, gift of trees of olives, first used to anoint a slab of stone by Jacob (Gen 28:18), and then by Moses, explicitly directed by YHWH, to anoint a tent, a chest, a table, a lamp, a laver, two altars, multiple utensils, and select humans (Exod 30:22-31).  And then in name—but without any written memory of actual pouring on the head in ceremony—of the Nazareth prophet, described as the “living stone,” head of the corner (I Pet 2:4-8).  An anointed one, smeared with Life from the fruits of trees quite particular to that local ecology.  Trees anchoring human dwelling in such a domain that today, are being ripped up by the thousands—just like State of Michigan settlers cut down birch forests central to Anishinaabe life or US cavalry killed buffalo of plains Indian peoples in the 19th century.  All of it designed to break the umbilical between indigenous cultures and local lands, genocidally disappear the human communities thereby “orphaned,” and re-tool the environments for capital. 

I start thus, because the question of extraction is at the heart of the question of invasion, occupation, and colonization.  Or perhaps more cogently named: the question of technology, of human uptake of other creatures, as armatures and prosthesis and shuttles and fuel for human bodies, claiming supremacies over other species and over other disparaged human communities.  Technology is the re-shaping of the entire planetary surface and immediate underground into an enslaved apparatus for a “hungry-ghost” humanity, rampaging insanely, refusing any concern for limit or future.

But it has not always been so.  More-than-human creatures can be taken up in modalities of respect and honoring as “tools” and yes, as food for human flourishing—as many indigenous communities know how to do. Indeed, as early Israel in its mix of escaped slaves from Egypt and revolting peasants from Canaanite cite-states knew how to do, re-initiated in such a lifeway in Levantine highlands for generations, before reverting back to abusive, extractive relations as a monarchy in expanding settlements serving hierarchy and seeking surplus. 

Continue reading “Our Oil-Future: Keep Pulling It Up, Or Learn to Pour It Down?” →

Damned Whiteness

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From Nichola Torbett, the associate director of Kirkridge Retreat Center.

“Damned Whiteness: How White Christians Failed the Black Freedom Movement and How We Can Do Better”

Friday evening, February 27-Sunday midday, March 1

The phrase “damned whiteness” comes from a 1961 poem by white Christian missionary Ralph Templin, who recognized his own whiteness as a “frightening disease” that kept him from showing up in true solidarity with Black freedom fighters. In a new book that takes Templin’s phrase as its title, historian David F. Evans explores how white Christian allies failed the Black Freedom Movement. Evans focuses his study on Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement; Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm; and Ralph Templin, co-founder of the Harlem Ashram and director of the nonviolent School for Living, identifying some common ways that their locations, perspectives, and interests as white people got in the way of their solidarity.

Day, Jordan, and Templin are all three in the streams of discipleship that inform ours at Kirkridge, and so it feels important that we take in these critiques and discern how we may need to course-correct. 

We could not be more delighted that Dr. Evans will join us for this retreat open to all and especially targeted toward white Christians committed to solidarity with Black people in the United States. We’ll have opportunities to hear him present his findings, to digest them in racial caucus spaces, and to explore how to commit ourselves to a path of true solidarity with Black liberation struggles today.

Come be in community as we learn together. Register here: https://kirkridge.org/programs-container/1226/damned-whiteness-how-white-christian-allies-failed-the-black-freedom-movement-and-how-we-can-do-better/

Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement is available for purchase via the online Book Nest. It is NOT required that you read the book prior to the retreat.

A Spirituality of Resistance and of Renewed Hope

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Another compelling offering from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón.

Beloved Comrades:

Starting next Monday January 26th, I will be teaching a three session mini-course on Latin American Liberation Theology at the University of Orange Free People’s University for Urban Restoration. All who are interested in this topic are welcome to attend. As we say at the U of O, everyone has something to teach and to learn. Hope to see you there. Registration link here and class information below:

“Latin American Liberation Theology is one of the signal developments in spirituality and transformative politics in the post-WWII era. This three session mini-course will introduce the historical contexts, community practices, and basic concepts of Liberation Theology to all those interested in the liberatory and spiritual aspects of community-building. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, captured the essence of the spirit of Liberation Theology when he wrote: “The process of liberation brings with it a profound conflict. Having the project be clear is not enough. What is necessary is a spirituality of resistance and of renewed hope to turn ever back to the struggle in the face of the defeats of the oppressed.” In a time of increasing conflict and struggle in our society, join us to renew your sense of hope by learning from our Latin American friends and fellow sojourners in the struggle for a better world.”

Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and ordained minister in The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM) who provides pastoral accompaniment to tenant rights organizing groups, labor unions, and immigrant justice movements in Los Angeles. He offers spiritual direction for faith-based activists. He is a U of O board member and minister at Faith + Works Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Orange, NJ. He first encountered the practice and theory of Liberation Theology when he lived and worked in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the mid-1980s as a young Jesuit. He lives in East LA in a queer Latina multigenerational household with his nieces, their moms, and fury canine nephews Biscuit and Hans Solo.

Costly Solidarity

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From Cole Parke-West of Christians for a Free Palestine.

It’s been a month since I returned home from Palestine. Earlier this week I started sharing pictures and videos from my time there on social media, including a short clip of Israeli soldiers in full combat gear, training their guns on me and other unarmed civilians. Multiple friends have commented that their initial assumption upon seeing the footage was that it was of ICE agents here in the U.S.. Indeed, both are functioning as U.S.-funded, government sponsored militias, acting with impunity to advance the violent agenda of white supremacy and religious nationalism.

It’s difficult to know how to talk about any of this, but the mandate from everyone I met in Palestine was, “Come and see; go and tell!” So I want to invite you to CFP’s upcoming community call on Thursday, January 22, at 8pm ET. I and others from CFP’s national leadership team will share about our recent trip to Palestine and how CFP plans on responding to Palestinian calls for “costly solidarity” — as well as how we’re connecting the dots between the influence of white Christian Nationalism and U.S. empire in Palestine, in Venezuela, and on the streets of Minneapolis.

I hope that you’ll join us, but more than anything, I want you to listen to Palestinians. Listen to their stories, listen to their dreams, listen to their anger and rage, listen to their laughter, listen to their questions, listen to their ideas — and know that ultimately, Palestinians will be the brilliant authors of their own liberation. (And thank god, because what I also know is that a free Palestine frees us all!)

My hope is that sharing our experiences, learnings, and observations will only serve to amplify theirs. So please come to CFP’s community call, where I’ll be sharing more reflections along with CFP’s leadership team, and we’ll talk about how we, collectively, can respond with solidarity to the calls of our Palestinian siblings. 

Click here to register for the call. It’s free.

A New Phase

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By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera-Colon, re-posted from social media

A Few More Notes on the Present Conjuncture

1. The Right’s Counter-revolution or Revolution (pick your nomenclature) is beginning to show cracks in its propaganda machinery at the meso-level. To my mind, the most prudent assumption is that this means we are entering a new phase of lethal political repression, ideological institution-scrubbing, and geopolitical violence. The Right doubles down when it smells an internal crisis. Its retort is to displace these contradictions unto its designated domestic and international enemies. Expect the cracks to turn into more extreme political action and rules breaking. We are at a point where we should retire the word “unprecedented” from our political vocabulary.

2. Local and state repressive apparatuses controlled by Democrats in large cities sooner or later will enact an armed intervention against Trump’s ICE militias which are drawn from various federal law enforcement entities (e.g., DEA, FBI, ATF, etc). The local and state police “professionals” are beginning to chafe at ICE’s disregard for even a simulacrum of protocols and procedures. Traditional policing is suffering its deepest legitimation crisis since the BLM uprisings. Expect bullets to fly soon. It is not unheard of for cold and hot civil wars to accelerate from within the state apparatus itself and then spread into the broader civil society.

3. Before Renee Good’s assassination, her wife advised one of the ICE fascists to deescalate: “I say you get you some lunch, big boy”: in that little phrase, she exposed one of the core elements in the relentless campaign of persecution against immigrants and their allies. The ICE agents are entangled in a cis straight masculinity that longs for a “big boy” status through which they could subordinate the rabble that has taken “their white country” away from them — its rightful owners and citizens. Attend to their swagging and penis-centered form of ambulation: the real Trumpian phallus is only available to them in their moments of violent abusive action against state-designated others.

4. Trump and his minions are enacting a hostile amendment to US ‘foreign policy’ by demarcating the Americas as their unquestionable domain. Repetition is the progenitor of all fascist polity. The kidnapping of Maduro and his wife being the first gambit in this new great game of blood and lucre. To impute madness to this new turn is to misread the moment. Clearly there is no normative rationality that US imperialism recognizes. Rather, we are entering an invigorated era of instrumental rationality wherein annexing Greenland, attacking Cuba even more intensely, and subordinating states in Latin America to US economic blackmail will be routine. The unipolar world is over. One has become three or four depending on how you measure it. You can imagine who the other global powers are now.

5. All of the above is made possible by what can be called the “Palestine Method”: what was exceptional is now an emerging baseline in which genocide, mass starvation, built environment destruction, and engineered population health disasters are now toolkits of preference for US and European elites protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. The babble of human rights, international law, and democracy are tantamount to political white noise machines deployed by shrinks to avert the attention of those waiting outside the door where the real talk is happening. The Palestine Method or some kind of multi-strategy people’s war. That is the binary choice now. The time for speeches is over. Let the bodies enjoin the machinery until the wheels stop grinding. G-d help us all.

Interrupted and Subverted

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Dean Hammer, on the Feast of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents (on the 135th anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890)

This year’s Prayer Service and Nonviolent Witness at the Pentagon on Dec. 29th  commemorates the Feast of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents—past and present. This day is also the anniversary of the “Wounded Knee Massacre,” where nearly 300 Lakota were killed by U.S. Army soldiers on that day in 1890. The Feast of the Holy Innocents recalls Herod’s retribution against the Jewish population–seeking to destroy Jesus and all male Jewish children in Bethlehem (two years old and younger), who represent a threat to his imperial power. Jesus’ earliest years as a refugee link the biblical story (Matthew 2:16–18) to the current state sanctioned atrocities by the U.S government against people seeking sanctuary and their advocates. The witness is sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, carrying forward the Atlantic Life Community’s ongoing witness at the Pentagon on the Feast of the Innocents since 1975.

The prayer service at the Pentagon is offered in the context of our dire times and the piercing question: Can the juggernaut of untethered corruption and mass violence be interrupted and subverted? Alligator Alcatraz, United States support for mass killing atrocities in Gaza, thousands of people in the US arrested and deported (many to unknown destinations and torture prisons) without due process, and millions of US citizens threatened with the loss of food, housing, and medical care: a dystopian time with incomprehensible suffering. The core beliefs, attitudes, values, and actions of Make America Great Again leaders and followers have fueled a degeneration of democracy in the U.S. at breakneck speed.

Paul Hawken reflects in Blessed Unrest (2007) how the largest movement to save the planet is restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. In this way, the Pentagon witness on Dec. 29th joins with the spirit of the Sumud Flotilla (bringing lifesaving aid and civilian protection to Gaza), and the Palestine Action (a UK pro-Palestinian direct action group, currently involved in a significant hunger strike by imprisoned members, protesting detention conditions and demanding release). Sumud is an Arabic word meaning steadfastness or perseverance, deeply rooted in Palestinian culture as a powerful form of nonviolent resistance and resilience against oppression and violence. Embracing an unwavering commitment to living with integrity and dignity amidst hegemonic power, the community of blessed unrest dares to dream and acts as a nemesis to illegitimate authority. In celebration of steadfast nonviolent witnesses, may we all find ways to honor the Holy Innocents, past and present.