Category: Subverting Empire

A Disgraceful Race to the Bottom

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GAORe-Posted from Marian Wright Edelman’s CHILD WATCH® COLUMN on the Children’s Defense Fund site.  For further reading, see the archive of her weekly writings.  

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month, “K-12 Education: Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities,” reminds us once again that suspensions and expulsions continue at high rates and offer grave risks to students. The report by this federal monitoring agency reviews data from the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection on school discipline trends across the country, provides a more in-depth look at discipline approaches and challenges faced in five states, and reviews past efforts by the Departments of Education and Justice to identify and address disparities and discrimination. Continue reading “A Disgraceful Race to the Bottom” →

Recovery from the Dominant Culture

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OaklandFrom the work of Oakland’s Seminary of the Street, a school for the training of love warriors working toward the transformation of their communities by embodying God’s love in the world. From 2013-2015, they ran an experimental “Recovery from the Dominant Culture” 12-step group. 

 

RECOVERY FROM THE DOMINANT CULTURE
PREAMBLE TO THE TWELVE STEPS

We are a fellowship of people in life recovery who share our experience, strength, and hope in order to be liberated into full aliveness. We believe that our social ills are perpetuated through the manufactured but unspoken cooperation of each of us and that changing our own ways of being can catalyze change in our communities. We do this by working the twelve steps, which teach us the countercultural practices of humility and surrender; honest vulnerability and confession, verbal and living amends as well as forgiveness; and humble service. Because we believe that we cannot fully recover without contributing to the healing of the culture that made us sick, we have modified the twelfth step to include that work. Continue reading “Recovery from the Dominant Culture” →

Philly: More Than Just Sports Hype

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Holy FoolWe are fired up for what is coming to Philadelphia this summer, after the NBA playoffs leaves town.  Holy Fool Arts is organizing its 7th residency of the Carnival de Resistance from July 24th through August 5th. Weekend productions (which weave storytelling, dance theater, live music, and circus arts) will be taking place at Arch St. United Methodist Church. 

CdR is rooted in a prophetic Tradition of many compelling strands.  This is how these holy fools describe it on their website: 

The Carnival de Resistance is made up of a diverse group of people who’s political persuasion and theology covers a spectrum of beliefs. The following are not indicative of the overall “message” of the Carnival, but are simply some of the historical movements, artistic traditions, fields of study and teachers that have influenced us.
Continue reading “Philly: More Than Just Sports Hype” →

Poor People’s Campaign: It’s Time to Resist and Rise Above

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PPCSign up now for the Poor People’s Campaign, a forty-day moral revival starting the day after Mother’s Day.  Forty states are organizing.  Throw in with the movement today!

From the Poor People’s Campaign website–a look at the movement in historical context.

Why a Poor People’s Campaign?

Just a year before his assassination, at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.

Continue reading “Poor People’s Campaign: It’s Time to Resist and Rise Above” →

Worthy of More Study and Attention

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation3 Comments

KapitalBy Dennis Moore

The first time I was ever stopped and searched by the police was on the way home from an anti-fascist protest.  The most seditious thing I had in my bag was a copy of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. I’d bought it on the way to the protest, but the fact that the police who were going through my stuff commented on it negatively just made me want to start reading it even more enthusiastically later that night!

Over the next few months, I trawled through the pages. It was obscenely difficult to understand.  I made pages upon pages of notes and repeatedly Googled terms I didn’t understand, but eventually I came stumbling over the finish line to the end of the book. Soon after, I went through it twice more–once with a local Marxist reading group and once with the aid of David Harvey’s free online lectures. Since then I’ve gone on to read many more works by both Marx and Engels, a few by Lenin and a number of more modern Marxist articles and pamphlets and even contributed a few of my own to a Marxist journal. Continue reading “Worthy of More Study and Attention” →

Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow

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The first essay (1942) in Time On Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (2015).  Bayard Rustin

RECENTLY I WAS PLANNING to go from Louisville to Nashville by bus. I bought my ticket, boarded the bus, and, instead of going to the back, sat down in the second seat. The driver saw me, got up, and came toward me.

“Hey, you. You’re supposed to sit in the back seat.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the law. N——‘s ride in back.”

I said, “My friend, I believe that is an unjust law. If I were to sit in back I would be condoning injustice.” Continue reading “Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow” →

Ancestors Rise Up!

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire1 Comment

Gloria RichardsonThe files of Civil Rights elder Ruby Sales have opened and gifted us with stories of freedom fighters of yesteryear.  May their stories never be forgotten. This is a sample, with descriptions from Ruby:

The indomitable and courageous sister SNCC leader Gloria Richardson (right) of the Cambridge, MD movement during the Southern Freedom Movement standing up in all of her Black women soul force power to White police. As the debate rages around the nation about good of bad policing, this picture reminds us of their systemic roles of using violence and terrorism to maintain the social order of White supremacy. Lest we forget this picture reminds us of the courage and front line struggle of our sisters.

Gloria Richardson is still alive and in her 90’s.

circa early 1960’s Continue reading “Ancestors Rise Up!” →

His Faith Demanded It

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

ConeFrom James Cone’s The Cross and The Lynching Tree (2013):

Just as Jesus knew he could be executed when he went to Jerusalem, Martin Luther King, Jr., knew that threats against his life could be realized in Memphis.  Like Jesus’ disciples who rejected the idea that his mission entailed his suffering and death (Mk 8:31-32), nearly everyone in King’s organization vigorously opposed his journey to Memphis, not only because of the dangers but because of the need to focus on the coming Poor People’s Campaign in Washington.  But King, like Jesus, felt he had no choice: he had to go to Memphis and aid the garbage workers in their struggle for dignity, better wages, and a safer work place.  He had to go because his faith demanded it.

The Malady of Militarism

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Weldon
Rev. Weldon Nisly, arrested a few years ago at a nonviolent protest on Good Friday in Seattle, WA

By Weldon Nisly, originally posted in Hospitality (April 2017), the newsletter of Atlanta’s Open Door Community

Militarism is “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit” revealing “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” With this prophetic proclamation a half century ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., named the sin-sickness of America’s warring violence. Dr. King was preaching to America from the Riverside Church pulpit in New York on April 4, 1967.

On that consequential night fifty years ago, Dr. King declared, “A time comes when silence is betrayal,” and boldly revealed the interconnected violence of America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” His sermon forever connected civil rights, poverty, and war arising from a malady deep within the American soul and psyche. Continue reading “The Malady of Militarism” →

Treacherous Machinations Around the Globe

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WalkerAfter George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Alice Walker said in an interview: “I know that Martin Luther King would have felt very saddened because he gave his life for a very much larger vision.” During the Obama years, Walker was asked in an interview with an Israeli publication what Dr. King would have thought of Obama’s America and what should be done to fulfill his vision.   This was her response:

Martin Luther King was a leader, a person of conviction.  He would find it difficult to comprehend, as I do, why Obama is incapable of standing up to Israel and why, whenever he tries, he soon collapses again.  I believe Obama started out in the presidency as a good and decent person.  With much ambition, but that is not a crime.  However, killing people in distant lands by drone attack is, in my opinion, a crime.  Condoning Israel’s crimes makes him an enabler of criminal behavior and complicit in the misery Israel causes to poor and frightened people.  This is almost unbearable to face, because I, like so many others, love Barack.  But we have lost him to the US government machine that is only running true to course in its treacherous machinations around the globe.  Continue reading “Treacherous Machinations Around the Globe” →