Category: Uncategorized
Learning From Counternarratives
The “achievement gap” is often presented as an isolated phenomenon, and it has become a misleading euphemism for the workings and product of historic oppression, structural injustice, and institutional racism.
Sarah Matsui, Learning From Counternarratives in Teach for America: Moving from Idealism Towards Hope (2015)
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes that nourish false charity.
Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972)
When Sarah Matsui graduated from Penn, she was accepted to the competitive Teach For America (TFA) program, a two-year teaching odyssey in urban and rural schools all over North America. More than $300 million strong and heralding education reform through meritocratic slogans like “Work Hard, Get Smart,“ Data-Driven” and “Closing the Achievement Gap,” for the past 25 years TFA has successfully recruited the highest caliber graduates from top U.S. schools to heroically stride into the nation’s most under-resourced classrooms. Continue reading “Learning From Counternarratives”
Beauty and the Beast
By Kim Redigan. First published in the Summer edition of On the Edge.
The assault on beauty in these times is brutal, unrelenting, traumatic as we fall ever more deeply into the nightmarish throes of what Naomi Klein calls “shock doctrine.” It doesn’t take a prophet to see that we are living through the end times of a ruthless economic system that is willing to soil its own nest and destroy its own children in order to feed an insatiable appetite for all that is good and God-given. A system, demonic by design, predicated on every kind of violence imaginable. Continue reading “Beauty and the Beast”
Neighbor back into the Hood
“We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.”
― Grace Lee Boggs
Live and die in God’s Love
From Franz Jagerstatter, in one of his last letters before he was beheaded on August 9, 1943 for being a conscientious objector in Germany
Just as the man who thinks only of this world does everything Possible to make life here easier and better, so must we, too, who believe in the eternal Kingdom, risk everything in order to receive a great reward there. Just as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference: we need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead, spiritual weapons–and the foremost among these is prayer…. Through prayer, we continually implore new grace from God, since without God’s help and grace it would be impossible for us to preserve the Faith and be true to His commandments….
Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for Those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.”
Wanting Clean Water
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean water makes you an activists. And why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.” Winona LaDuke
Be Still
“Be still and know that I am God.” -Psalm 46:10
I am with you
“I am with you. Let us together say from the heart: no family without lodging, no rural worker without land, no laborer without rights, no people without sovereignty, no individual without dignity, no child without childhood, no young person without a future, no elderly person without a venerable old age. Keep up your struggle and, please, take great care of Mother Earth. I pray for you and with you, and I ask God our Father to accompany you and to bless you, to fill you with his love and defend you on your way by granting you in abundance that strength which keeps us on our feet: that strength is hope, the hope which does not disappoint. Thank you and I ask you, please, to pray for me.” – Pope Francis
Our Children
For people of all colors.
In all of our conversation about Charleston, we have not focused on the children who witnessed this terror and how this traumatizes them. I know the trauma of being young and witnessing a white supremacist murder of a friend. Our children like all other children must have the space to grow up without having to raise their hands and say do not shoot. Black people if we do not stop this terrorism of our children, no one else will. Nor will they respect us or trust us not to abandon them. We must gather around them and let the world know that young Black lives matter. Either we protect them or they will protect themselves and trust me,it won’t be pretty.
This is an American problem, and people of all colors must stand up and declare that Black children deserve to be safe and grow up with the confidence that they can move freely in the world with the abandonment of youth.
Ruby Sales
Working Out Our Salvation in the Wake of Charleston
By Lindsay Airey, LMFT
In the wake of the Emmanuel A.M.E. massacre, it’s hard not to succumb to the dueling poles of cynicism or despair, grandiosity or silencing shame. It is so easy to feel powerless and hopeless in the face of widespread white denial. Or exasperated and enraged at a grandiose white culture that wants to dismiss this as “not a race issue.” It’s about mental illness, they say. Or easy access to guns.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for gun control. And, as a licensed marriage & family therapist, I most certainly want policies and practices in American culture that lead to more compassionate, empathic & constructive understandings of and responses to mental illness. Taking refuge in culture war issues in the face of the horrific slaughter in Charleston, however, only pours more emotional salt in the gaping wound of a people who, around every corner in American history, has had to deal with the deadly consequences of white denial in all its subtle, and not so subtle, forms. Continue reading “Working Out Our Salvation in the Wake of Charleston”
