Oppression

As a human rights worker during Argentina’s Dirty War, I learned to read the signs.

Caste is more complex than Isabel Wilkerson suggests. But she excels at forcing open our eyes to the horrific realities of racism.

De La Torre has little use for hope in a God who only seems to show up for Christians, never for their victims.

A summer of racial unrest throughout the country has led to calls in the presidential campaign to “restore law and order.” It’s the same line used by Richard Nixon in 1968 to appeal to white nationalist fears of black criminality after the “long hot summer of 1967.” Racialized wars on drugs emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—directed against Chinese people for opium use, African Americans in the South for charges of cocaine use, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans surrounding allegations of marijuana use. 

Then there is peyote, a sacred medicine and religious adjunct in Native American worship.

In Ohio, an angry Donald Trump responds after he tweeted an anti-Semitic image of Hillary Clinton from a white supremacist group. He blasts the media for their criticism of the image: “They’re racial profiling, they’re profiling. Not us.” How is this even possible? Two black men are killed by police. Brutally and violently. And a billionaire white man, with every privilege in the world, says he’s the victim.

It seems like everywhere you go Christians in one way or another are talking about Christendom. Actually, the word being used most is post-Christendom.

We are endlessly being misdirected in search of the crude “hate crime.” After centuries of racial oppression and violence, our society eventually became uncomfortable with the overtness of the racism of the past. Slavery is taken for granted as a horrific thing, something that couldn’t be assumed a few generations ago. For mainstream America, to be accused of being racist is to have been labeled something despicable. Few would willingly accept this charge upon themselves, defending themselves adamantly against such accusations. However, even worse than the racist label for those within the dominant culture, is for a person to be accused of a hate crime. Hate crimes have been created to isolate the most heinous of offenses that have been committed because of prejudice.

The failure in the white privilege stewardship model is that it inherently affirms and utilizes the very thing that it is called to resist and counter. If the answer to our racial problems is that white people must run things, call the shots, and be the saviors to the world, then we have missed the mark.