Category: Subverting Empire

Until They Became Landless Non-Citizens

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MadleyFrom Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, quoted early and often at last week’s Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute in Southern California.

…federal lawmakers expelled California Indians from mainstream colonial California society and relegated them to a shadowy legal and social status between man and beast. This was not preordained. In each phase of legislation, anti-Indian views prevailed over more sympathetic voices, each time pushing Indians farther beyond the bounds of citizenship and community. Through a succession of laws, legislators slowly denied California Indians membership in the body politic until they became landless non-citizens, with few legal rights and almost no legal control over their own bodies. Indians became, for many Anglo-Americans, nonhumans. This legal exclusion of California Indians from California society was a crucial enabler of mass murder.

Book Recs from Professor Kendi

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KendiFrom a Bill Moyers interview with Ibram X. Kendi, the author of Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2017). Kendi was asked what five books should be mandatory reading (once readers were done with his book). 

I think that it really depends on what they’re interested in. But I think books that are critical in understanding the popular sort of discussions that we’re having now that have to do with race injustice. Of course, there is Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, which I think really takes the reader through understanding how much of a problem the death penalty is, how much of a black problem it is, and how virulently racist the policies and operators are within that — in Alabama and other places. Continue reading “Book Recs from Professor Kendi” →

A Vision

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CornelAn excerpt from The Sun Magazine’s interview with Dr. Cornel West.

Fluidity doesn’t necessarily mean subversion. You can be highly fluid and just come up with creative ways of adjusting to or reproducing the status quo. Fluidity and flexibility are important, but to transform society you need more than that. You need a vision. You need a different way of looking at the world. That’s where the Hebrew prophets and the legacy of Jerusalem come in. The words of Isaiah, Micah, and others authorized an alternative vision of the world. Continue reading “A Vision” →

Death is All They’ve Got to Stand On

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Screen Shot 2019-02-15 at 9.26.01 AMBy Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann (right)

*This is the 8th installation of a year-long series of posts from contributors all over North America each answering the question, “How would you define radical discipleship?” We will be posting responses regularly on Mondays during 2019.

If you would be my disciples… take up your cross and follow me.

I am so glad for this beloved mosaic, a series piecing together the shape of radical discipleship in our moment (plus the history we stand upon and with). The calls to the discipline of Jesus are here rooted in spirit, heart, earth, watershed, creaturehood, beauty, community and the stories of a Way incarnate. Continue reading “Death is All They’ve Got to Stand On” →

Practices Cannot Be Separated From The Bodies That Practice Them

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Hara1An excerpt from Tada Hozumi‘s brilliant piece “The Key to Healing Whiteness is Understanding Cultural Somatic Context,” originally posted on the Selfish Activist site last month.

Intellectualism itself is a white colonialist pattern. It’s only natural that whiteness can’t be solved through brain wrangling. Usually what happens is that the intellectual quality of systemic analysis often leads people to burn out, usually with their micro-aggressing behaviors intact. Continue reading “Practices Cannot Be Separated From The Bodies That Practice Them” →

We Are the Offspring of the Ignorantly Discarded

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Alice WalkerA sample from Alice Walker’s newest book of poetry Taking the Arrow Out of The Heart (October 2018). This is called “I Am Telling You, Discouraged One, We Will Win.”

I am telling you
Discouraged One
we will win.
And I will show you
why.
We are the offspring
of the ignorantly
discarded:
we conjure
sunrise
with our smiles
and provoke music
out of trash.
Who can completely
disappear
such genius? Continue reading “We Are the Offspring of the Ignorantly Discarded” →

Anti-Semitism and Hypocrisy at the Top: a Jewish response

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OmarBy Wes Howard-Brook

Three, young, powerful, brash women of color have come down upon the Capitol and left the old while folks there sputtering in their wake. The most well-known—so much so that she already can be recognized by her initials, AOC—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY)—has blown the doors off Congress by daring to offer her “Green New Deal” vision. The other two are both Muslim women, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Tlaib and Omar have strongly promoted the international “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction” campaign to pressure the Israeli government to withdraw from West Bank settlements. Continue reading “Anti-Semitism and Hypocrisy at the Top: a Jewish response” →

For What Do We Hope

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Ken SehestedBy Ken Sehested (right with grandchildren), whose fluency tends toward poetic expression, in response to our 2019 question, “What is your definition of radical discipleship?”

 “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone
who demands from you an accounting for the hope
that is in you: yet do it in gentleness and reverence.”
—1 Peter 3:15-16

To your feet, you pilgrims of faith’s long journey! Stand and pledge your allegiance to that nation-supplanting Realm to come.

For what do we hope?

We hope for the Beloved’s Promise to overtake the world’s broken-hearted threat. Continue reading “For What Do We Hope” →

The Failed Attempts That Lead to Bigger Successes

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keeyanaAn excerpt from Jacobin’s recent interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University.

…a lot of people who are unfamiliar with organizing, through no fault of their own, have little idea that it’s often the failed attempts that lead to the bigger successes. Big, successful marches that are connected to social movements — especially in the 1960s — don’t come from heaven. They have to be built and organized. And sometimes that lesson today can be distorted, because you can have lots of money from foundations that swoop in and make all of these resources available, but you still have the same problem: if it’s not connected to ongoing organization or organizing, then it’s a flash in a pan that can bring attention to a particular issue but doesn’t create the means to actually do anything about it.

What Freedom Means

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robin d.g. kelleyAn excerpt from Robin D.G. Kelley’s 2016 “Yes, I Said ‘National Liberation.'” Re-posted from Verso. 

Whatever the reasons, our solidarity ought to be based on building a new world together. I am not suggesting that we abandon the struggle to hold Israel accountable for its continued crimes against humanity and violations of international law, or that we stop mourning and honoring the dead, or that we cease any of the immediate actions designed to sustain life and bring a modicum of peace. But peace is impossible without justice. The brilliant Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif put it best: “The world treated Gaza as a humanitarian case, as if what the Palestinians needed was aid. What Gaza needs is freedom.” And what is freedom for Palestine? “Free Palestine” means, at a minimum, completely ending the occupation; dismantling all vestiges of apartheid and eradicating racism; holding Israel accountable for war crimes; suspending the use of administrative detention, jailing of minors, and political repression; freeing all political prisoners; recognizing the fundamental rights of all Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of Israel for full equality and nationality; ensuring all Palestinians a right to return and to receive just compensation for property and lives stolen, destroyed, and damaged in one of the greatest colonial crimes of the twentieth century.