What do you call it when you don’t have to care?

“... I would ask whites what they would have us do to secure their tepid and revocable support for the notion that we shouldn’t be gunned down by the police. Not get shot in the back by the cops? Yeah, we’ve tried that. Not get pissed off when we get shot in the back? When that happens, y’all just let our murderers go back to the work of murdering us. Protest, but don’t be civilly disobedient when we do? We do that, and those protests are never covered. The only time the media shows our daytime protests is when Bill Barr gasses them so the president can take a photo-op. 

....

“There is no way to protest white supremacy in a way that will meet the approval of white supremacists.”

— Elie Mystal . The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started . The Nation . AUGUST 31, 2020

Come On — You Know What I Mean.

The question behind the question...

 F. C. Yohn, in Lowell Thomas, The Hero of Vincennes: The Story of George Rogers Clark, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), facing p. 116.
https://www.in.gov/history/2988.htm

This is My Confession | @OKNowYouGo

This week, I joined friends and friends of friends trying to acknowledge our unearned privilege and just responsibilities as people who wake up white in America every day.

https://www.facebook.com/OKNOWYOUGO/

I add my confession — first offered at a gathering convened by Michelle Lang-Raymond as "A Chat w/ White Folks" two days after the murder of George Floyd [https://youtu.be/qylb2dEsuIA] — to confessions and laments offered by people from all over.

OK, Now You Go.

sticks + stones

in the wind | tweets from the space ending 02.14.15

Are expressions of contrition and humility off-limits at the national prayer breakfast? 
http://wapo.st/1vdQOWc 

while white people watched | new research documents lynchings of 3959 black Americans 1877-1950 http://bit.ly/1DBxIjF 

white male privilege + the benefit of the doubt jimhancock.blogspot.com

blinded by...what? | a week in denial observed jimhancock.blogspot.com

blinded by...what? | a week in denial observed

This week, E.J. Dionne wrote:

Do Obama’s critics think that Christians reduce their credibility by acknowledging their imperfections? Is it disrespectful of Christ to admit that Christians regularly fall short of His teachings?
....
The prayer breakfasts draw many decent souls, I know, but if expressions of contrition and humility are off-limits and acknowledgments of our own limitations are unacceptable, are these gatherings really about praying to a merciful God or are they just celebrations of ourselves? 

This week, Bill Moyers wrote: 

The victim’s name was Jesse Washington. The year was 1916. America would soon go to war in Europe “to make the world safe for democracy.” My father was twelve, my mother eight. I was born 18 years later, at a time, I would come to learn, when local white folks still talked about Washington’s execution as if it were only yesterday. This was not medieval Europe. Not the Inquisition. Not a heretic burned at the stake by some ecclesiastical authority in the Old World. This was Texas, and the white people in that photograph were farmers, laborers, shopkeepers, some of them respectable congregants from local churches in and around the growing town of Waco.
....
When the flames died away, Washington’s body was torn apart and the pieces were sold as souvenirs.
....
Jesse Washington was just one black man to die horribly at the hands of white death squads. Between 1882 and 1968 — 1968! — there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US. About a quarter of them were white people, many of whom had been killed for sympathizing with black folks. 

This week, Jamelle Bouie wrote:

I should emphasize that blacks of the era understood lynching as rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” wrote NAACP leader Walter White in 1929, “No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching.”
....
The only Southern Christianity united in its opposition to lynching was that of black Americans, who tried to recontextualize the onslaught as a kind of crucifixion and its victims as martyrs, flipping the script and making blacks the true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption. It’s that last point which should highlight how none of this was intrinsic to Christianity: It was a question of power, and of the need of the powerful to sanctify their actions. 

This week, Jonathan Merritt wrote: 

I have deep disagreements with President Obama, and I have written of them on several occasions. But at the National Prayer Breakfast, the President was right. Sadly, many Christians participated in needless hysteria that robs them of an opportunity for honesty and humility.

Thirty-five years ago, Annie Dillard wrote:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.

—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper and Row, 1977 p 56-57

And, sometime late in the first century, John wrote:

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. 

—1 John 1.8-10, New International Version

Poised now at the threshold of Lent, in the face all we have done — and all we've failed to do — what will we write (and value, and believe, and say, and do, and…)?

in the wind | tweets in the space ending 04.05.14

interesting arc | TheCut.com editorial staff discuss NYT piece on talking with kids about porn http://thecut.io/1gOcPqJ

Stop right there | a soul-killing special tax on dark-skinned Americans http://bit.ly/1gOhARg 

Social Combat | a challenging new study on peer victimization at school http://bit.ly/1kv2oHN 

What actually happened | Sinner90 asked: "Teens of Reddit what's cool nowadays?" http://bit.ly/1kv4jvX 

sophisticated innocents | a small idea from Raising Adults http://jimhancock.blogspot.com