A Staring Competition

This week, I began a Doctor of Ministry program at a local seminary in Washington, D.C.  The first class was on the politics of the church.  Today, during a lunch break , I decided to leave campus to eat.  I had packed a lunch with a few of my favorites to include a turkey sandwich […]

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The Race Trap

What is it that we see in race that we cannot see apart from it?  Why do we prefer to get closer to it than to ourselves?  This literal carnal identity, we are known by our skin.  It is the way of the world.  It is the way things are people remind me. No other […]

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Racism 099: The Big (White) Man on Campus

“In the decades before the American Revolution, merchants and planters became not just the benefactors of colonial society but its new masters.  Slaveholders became college presidents.  The wealth of the traders determined the locations and decided the fates of colonial schools.  Profits from the sale and purchase of human beings paid for campuses and swelled […]

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Overhearing Evil: Race offers the same old story

“After all these generations and centuries of practice, we still don’t know how to see and talk about ourselves or each other.  We are at the same time obsessed with ‘race’ and wholly confounded by it.” |Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self- Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race Oppressed and oppressor, master and slave, America has […]

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