What We Don’t Know About Black Social Gospel: A Long-Neglected Tradition Is Reclaimed
For twenty years I have sprinkled discussions of the black social gospel into various books…
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The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God
God ain’t good all of the time.
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When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”
I wanted to think about how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that.
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Marriage Equality: Race, Family Values, and the 99%
According to the US Census, families are becoming less nuclear, headed up by more single parents, childless couples, and LGBT couples with children. Yet family diversity is still only a revelation in the mainstream media, which continues to promote the model of nuclear familyhood, even if it is provisionally represented by elite white gay The Kids Are All Right-style yuppie throwbacks with photogenic children.
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Obama as Lord and Savior
Pundits fume, but the images of Obama as Jesus are out there. And they mean something.
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Gay, Black, and Quaker: History Catches Up with Bayard Rustin
As NAACP President Ben Jealous told the Times last week, “it’s become clear that, just as Bayard Rustin admonished us all, that we would either stand together or die apart.”
“Who admonished us?” readers must have asked. Bayard Rustin’s role as advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and as organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech) should have assured his place in American social and political history. But Rustin has long been denied his proper place—largely because he was an openly gay man.
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God’s Body, God’s Plan: The Komen Furor and Abortion as Black/Latino “Genocide”
Over the past several years, Black and Latino fundamentalist anti-abortion groups have vigorously aligned themselves with the white religious right in the battle to take down family planning. The current furor over the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding for Planned Parenthood highlighted the role of Eve Sanchez Silver, founder of a little-known group called the International Coalition of Color for Life. According to the Los Angeles Times, Sanchez Silver, a former medical research analyst for and charter member of the Komen Foundation, has been a leading advocate against Planned Parenthood within Komen.
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Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant
I will not go to see the movie The Help because already I have encountered and regularly encounter enough messages suggesting history is made only by white agency. I will not go to see the movie The Help because I do not wish to view yet another production that tells me, a black woman, it is all about whiteness.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: LGBT Advocates Need Public Progressive Faith
“As a black, feminist, marriage-equality advocate I reside at an important intersection in this struggle. This movement must acknowledge the unique history of racial oppression, while still revealing the interconnections of all marriage exclusion. This work must reflect the feminist critique of marriage, while still acknowledging the ancient, cross-cultural, human attachment to marriage. This work must be staunchly supportive of same-sex marriage, while rejecting a marriage-normative framework that silences the contributions of queer life.”
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Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder
African-American people were taught Christianity in the context of oppression. When people are disempowered, they are often empowered at someone else’s expense, whether it’s women or children or gay people. How do we get through that?
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