Category: Subverting Empire

You Either Are or You Are Not

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AdichieDay 40 of our Lenten journey beyond “Beyond Vietnam.”  Excerpted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recently released Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions (2017):

Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite; the idea of conditional female equality. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women, or you do not.

Teach your daughter to question language. A friend of mine says she will never call her daughter “princess”. The word is loaded with assumptions, of a girl’s delicacy, of the prince who will come to save her. This friend prefers “angel” and “star”. So decide the things you will not say to your child. You know that Igbo joke, used to tease girls who are being childish – “What are you doing? Don’t you know you are old enough to find a husband?” I used to say that often. But now I choose not to. I say, “You are old enough to find a job.” Because I do not believe that marriage is something we should teach young girls to aspire to.  Continue reading “You Either Are or You Are Not” →

For The Long-Haul

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MonicaDay 39 of our Lenten Journey continues beyond “Beyond Vietnam.”  What now?  For nine more days, we listen to voices calling us onwards, to live out the legacy of Dr. King.  Today, we hear from Monica Lewis-Patrick (right), point guard of Detroit’s struggle for water affordability, excerpted from a conversation she had with a youth group visiting Detroit in July 2016:

People are driven by either two things: pleasure or pain. What has driven me over the past ten years living in this city is watching a lot of pain. That pain has sparked a passion. I’m 50 years old. I’ve done social justice work since I was 16 years old. In North Carolina, in Tennessee, the Deep South. I’ve been in Detroit for ten years and I can tell you there’s not a lot of difference.

What I do know is that people cannot come into the city with the attitude of being a missionary, that “I’m just going to do good in the hood,” and then go back to their community and live well or live in privilege. I think it’s only about immersing yourself in the community and culture and I think it’s only by allowing yourself to be courageous enough to interface with people that make you uncomfortable. I think sometimes it takes us out of our comfort zone—it’s not easy for us who are doing front line justice work to allow outsiders in because of distrust and co-opting and people taking advantage of our trust and the sanctity of these spaces.  So it has to be a commitment and willingness to be committed for the long-haul.

I think the other thing about social justice work is that everyone has to decide what amount of themselves they can give to this work. But I think you’ve got to be fully committed, that it’s got to be a life-long commitment because people know the difference. They know when you are coming in to extract from their community so you can feel better about yourself or when you come to give yourself to that community, to let the collective heal so that we can feel better about ourselves. That’s the difference and we know the difference.

White Supremacy Defined

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aliciaDay 38 of our Lenten Journey continues beyond “Beyond Vietnam.”  What now?  For nine more days, we listen to voices calling us onwards, to live out the legacy of Dr. King.  Today, we ponder this “working definition of white supremacy” from Chicago-based community organizer Alicia Crosby:  

White supremacy establishes whiteness as superior to other racial identities through the elevation of the needs, wants, concerns, perspectives, feelings, and desires of white people over that of people of color. This includes the centering of the theological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and economic priorities and preferences rooted in whiteness as well as the appropriation and rebranding of cultural expressions sourced from people of color.

From Disposability to Essentiality

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Ruby SalesDay 37 of our Lenten Journey beyond “Beyond Vietnam.  From Ruby Sales (photo right), Civil Rights veteran and long-distance runner for justice, in an interview with Krista Tippett:

I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted because they feel that their lives have no meaning, because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death, whether it’s heroin addiction. Continue reading “From Disposability to Essentiality” →

A Revolutionary Period

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Grace LeeDay 36 of our Lenten Journey continues beyond “Beyond Vietnam.”  What now?  For our final dozen days, we will listen to voices calling us onwards, to live out the legacy of Dr. King.  

From the late Grace Lee Boggs (photo right, with husband Jimmy) in The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century (2012)

…we need to see ourselves not as victims but as new men and women who, recognizing the sacredness in ourselves and in others, can view love and compassion, in the words of Martin Luther King, not as “some sentimental and weak response” but instead as “the key that unlocks the doors which leads to ultimate reality.” Continue reading “A Revolutionary Period” →

A Creative Psalm of Peace

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mlkDay 35 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam.”

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment do decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
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-Today, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam.”  Rachel Harding, Ruby Sales, Michelle Alexander and many others will be gathering tonight at Riverside Church from 7-9pm EDT.

-Listen to the original audio recording of Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in its entirety HERE.

-For more analysis of the speech, Dr. Vincent Harding and the history social justice movements in the U.S., check out this Iconoclast episode with Joanna Shenk, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers, recorded at the February 2017 Kinsler Institute hosted by Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries.

The Choice is Ours

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DEM 2016 ConventionDay 34 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

From Rev. William Barber II (photo above) in an interview with Religion Dispatches: 

Be open to the Spirit moving us in new ways. Recently I was in New York City to receive an award from a philanthropist. After I’d received the award, this 90 year-old elder’s son invited me to walk to where his dad was seated as he has some difficulty walking these days. But he insisted upon getting up and grabbed my hand with great passion. “I’m so glad to be giving my money this year to a Movement that I know is making a difference,” he said. Continue reading “The Choice is Ours” →

We Must Find New Ways

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ConeDay 33 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
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From James Cone in Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991):

King’s words have been appropriated by the people who rejected him in the 1960s. So by making his birthday a national holiday, everybody claims him, even though they opposed him while he was alive. They have frozen King in 1963 with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. That is the one that can best be manipulated and misinterpreted. King also said, shortly after the Selma march and the riots in Watts, ‘They have turned my dream into a nightmare.’ Continue reading “We Must Find New Ways” →

The Fierce Urgency of Now

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MelanieDay 32 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

By Melanie Morrison (photo above), Director at Allies For Change

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in the pulpit at Riverside Church that the war in Vietnam was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Dr. King warned that America would continue to be a dangerous purveyor of oppressive, counterrevolutionary violence in distant lands if it failed to acknowledge the systemic racism that lay — as an unhealed wound — at the heart of our nation. He decried the egregious irony that young black men were being sent eight thousand miles away “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Continue reading “The Fierce Urgency of Now” →

The First Hope in our Inventory

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SNGDay 31 of our Lenten Journey through Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

From Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin (photo above, with family), Wilderness Way Community (Portland, OR)

I turn my headlamp off. A faint pulse of fear shoots through me in that split second of complete darkness before my eyes adjust. Wind whips. Salty water sprays off the crashing waves. The ocean roars. I mean, roars.

This is not a habit of mine — venturing alone to the beach at night in gale force winds. But I cannot find my place in the camaraderie and singing around the campfire. Tonight, I am overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the turbulent oceans and ever-rising tides of hate manifesting in our country. Overwhelmed by the tidal wave of climate change already literally crashing in on our shores. Internally I flail and gasp for air, inundated by the torrential consequences of greed and corruption, sexism and homophobia, racism and classism, colonialism and violence — everywhere it seems, violence — economic and ecological, sexual and physical, psychological and spiritual. The deluge just. doesn’t. stop. Continue reading “The First Hope in our Inventory” →