restless reformer

After a pretty lengthy discussion at the BHT on race and several posts here, I decided to try to root myself in some Christian thinking on race, and it’s been helpful. This discussion is so multi-faceted and complex that it’s difficult enough to get all the assumptions on the table in the first place, […]

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Bill Kristol, neocon par excellence (if you can even use the word “excellence” when talking about a neocon, which you can’t…I’m still irritated that the NYT picked that guy as the “conservative,” though I’m not surprised. It is the NYT, after all.) has written an abysmal response to Obama’s speech. In the first […]

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I’m 29 years old, and I’m already crazy skeptical and cynical when it comes to politics. So when I started reading comments this afternoon about how Obama’s speech, which I didn’t catch when it happened, was perhaps the greatest speech on race ever given by a politician, I had my doubts.
I watched the speech a […]

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Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf). It’s years old now, so some of it’s out-of-date; but it’s eye-opening nonetheless.
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like […]

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For clarification: Jeremiah Wright is not the kind of person I’m upholding as a model for racial reconciliation. I’m using the controversy as a springboard to talk about race issues.
Here’s Barack’s statement on Jeremiah Wright, which I think is appropriate and not just the right move politically, but the right move period.
On the other […]

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This is a very controversial piece, and I freely admit I may have to rethink some of this as discussion moves forward. Additional Point: One of the things I’m trying to do with this series is to demonstrate that one can agree with “liberals” or “progressives” (for lack of better words) on the causes and […]

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