Tag: <span>Racial Justice</span>

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5 Reasons Christians Should Oppose the Death Penalty

As the pandemic continues to spiral out of control, it has consumed news media making little to no room for the fact that the US Justice Department has executed 3 men in the past couple of weeks. In the state of Tennessee, executions resumed in 2018 and has since executed 7 people. This inhuman and barbaric punishment continues to be swept under the rug and ignored while many Christians and Christian political leaders still cling to the practice. But this practice, though complex and complicated by the trauma experienced by surviving murder victims’ families, goes against the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith.
Here are 5 reasons Christians Should Oppose the Death Penalty:
Christians believe that life overcomes death. Christians hold to the resurrection story of a Savior that overcomes death – a Savior that was sentenced to death and executed on a Roman Cross. We will never know the suffering of the victims of murder, but we can offer needed support to their families and comm..

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7 Things Everyone Should Know About Confederate Monuments

Scattered throughout this country are statues and monuments dedicated to the remembrance of specific people in a specific time and place. For the South, it is quite common to stroll through a park and see the bust or a full figured cast of a man in bronze atop a cement pillar with engraved plagues telling the spectators the history behind these confederate soldiers or political leaders. These monuments are tall, robust, clad in “heritage” and “history”. And yet, they mark a moment in time when slavery was the foundational part of the economy, and violence toward Black people was so deeply engrained in society. Confederate monuments are not simply cement and bronze; they are intentionally placed racist markers meant to cement white supremacy within the culture of society.
Here are 7 things everyone should know about confederate monuments:
Symbols of oppression for Black people. During the period of Reconstruction and after the Civil War, organizations like the Daughters of the Confe..

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Presbyterians and the American Civil Rights Movement

The recent, tragic death of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests currently occurring throughout the United States and the world have fanned the flames of a movement that has burned for over sixty-five years. With new names and organizations entering the movement, the fight for civil rights continues to bring light to the darkness that social injustice and hate crimes create.
The current state of violence aimed at Black people and other minority groups has caused me to reflect on ways in which I have been both supportive of and problematic to the civil rights effort. In response, I’ve decided, among other things, to start this column which will focus on how the Church can positively participate in progressive justice movements. I am calling this column “Justice is a Verb”, which is a nod to Micah 6:8 where we are explicitly told to, “Do Justice”. This passage teaches us that Justice is an action. It is not passive, but something that we are supposed to do. Readin..

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“The Need to Dream and A Chance to Heal”

On a chilly day in February of this year, I was enjoying a delightful time with one of my daughters, replacing the radiator on her hand-me-down, 240,000 mile vehicle. Changing the radiator in the middle of my southwest Baltimore street made for some unexpectedly wonderful encounters. There was our mail carrier who reintroduced himself after he and I had met at a neighborhood party. An older woman, impressed by my daughter’s dirty hands, said to me, “You need to come and get my son off the couch. He won’t do nothing.” There was the neighbor who used to do his own car work and offered to loan tools should we need any, another neighbor who I learned refurbishes motorcycles (“I’ve been riding them since before I had a driver’s license!”) and the random stranger who drew out an 8” knife blade to help us remove a stuck hose. “Don’t worry,” he said somewhat reassuringly, “I won’t stick you.” I was reminded how, in the midst of so many challenges in our public life, most people in most places ..

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Lazarus is Walking in Baltimore: A Resurrection Uprising

I. His eyes wouldn’t stay shut.
They taped them shut,
and then they’d just pop open again …
Initially, it seemed like small talk on a typical Sunday afternoon. That, at least, is what I imagined when I sat down at a round table with Treshawna Williams, LaChelle Rice, and Phyllis Scott in Reid Chapel, just outside the main sanctuary of the First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. It was a little after 2 p.m. on March 24, 2019. Our church was preparing to host a community-wide concert to raise awareness about the violence in our city. So it was that Treshawna, Phyllis, and LaChelle were there, in Reid Chapel, preparing to speak in a traditionally white church. They were united by a story of loss: each had lost a child to the violence in Baltimore, Treshawna just a few months before.2
If the concert that followed was powerful (and it was), the testimonies of these three women were inexpressibly beautiful and to the same degree painful. Yet wha..

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7 Ways White Jesus Perpetuates White Supremacy

For many white folk, the image of Christ as a white man is normal. Portraits by the famous artist, Warren Sallman, hang in many churches and households instilling the image of the white Jesus in the minds of many church members. When a Google search is conducted to find images of Christ, stock photos and webpages fill the search results with images of a whitewashed Christ that, again, perpetuates how we see the Savior of our world.
Jesus’ depiction as a white man is not only false, but it is a sin. These false artistic depictions perpetuate, intentionally, the oppressive violence and power hungry motives of white supremacy. Here are just 7 Ways White Jesus Perpetuates White Supremacy:
White Jesus whitewashes the Brown Jesus. The whiteness of the falsely created white Jesus erases the Brownness of the actual Christ who dwelt among humanity. The humanity of Christ was lived out as a brown person with a certain culture and a certain time and space. As we believe in the incarnation, we..

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Setting the Table, Moving Forward, and ‘Not Going Anywhere’

HISTORICAL JOURNEY
The beginnings and journey of Knox Presbyterian Church reveal a church community with a defiant hope and a tenacious faith to overcome all odds to be followers of Jesus Christ.
Knox was started in 1926 as a mission to address the great Black migration from the south to the North. My own family moved from Chester, South Carolina to Baltimore in that migration.
My parents were products of Brainard Institute, a missionary effort started by Presbyterians in South Carolina. They and my grandparents settled in East Baltimore and were some of the first members of the fledgling missional Knox church.
At a time when Black Presbyterian ministers were primarily trained at the two Black Presbyterian seminaries, Johnson C Smith and Lincoln University, the church chose a young man of 26 years by the name of Herman Octavius Graham, relatively new to our shores from Jamaica.
He was chosen to start the effort with little to no resources and there was still much debate then abou..

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5 Reasons for Racial Affinity Groups in Anti-Racism Work

Anti-racism work and training is by no means work that needs to be done in silos. But when it comes to dismantling white supremacy and racism, white people and people of color have different work to do. This means that white people need to do the work separate from their siblings of color before any type of reconciliation happens. Here are just 5 reasons why separating into race based affinity groups is important for anti-racist work.
People of color need spaces to grieve, lament, mourn, and share their emotions in community away from white people.
White people tend to take up excess space as well as center conversation around themselves. People of color, gathering together in their own spaces, may find more freedom and trust to do the work they need to do in processing.White people created white supremacy so white people need to do the work to dismantle it.
White supremacy is a white people’s problem and it is going to take white people’s intentional efforts to dismantle white supr..

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I Can’t Breathe: Systematic Police Brutality in the United States

Minneapolis, in full light of day, George Floyd, an African American man, age 46 was lynched by a police officer of European descent. His execution was transmitted live on Facebook and has led to a global movement fighting against police brutality and ongoing impacts of polices and laws designed to protect and support European descendants.
George Floyd was handcuffed and laid on the street with his head to one side. The police officer, Derek Chauvin, had his knee around his neck and two other officers were holding him by the waist and legs for over eight minutes. George Floyd’s final words were “Please, please, please, I can’t breathe. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can’t breathe.” The police officers continued to hold him until the ambulance arrived to verify his death. This murder comes amid multiple news reports of other African Americans who were also killed by police in the United States.
SAN JOSE, CA – MAY 29: A protester takes a knee in front of San Jose ..