[progress of human rights in canada]

It's easy to see the shortcomings of others, and to ignore one's own failings.

This is noticeable, for example, in the American focus on commemorating the Nazi holocaust while ignoring its own holocaust.

This is noticeable in my life as I thought that Canada - my country - has been doing okay while our neighbour to the south has been pretty messed up. And then on the weekend, I came across the Canadian Human Rights Commission website and read through our own history.... which is pretty horrible.

For a sobering starting point, read this summary of what things were like in Canada in the early 1900's.

While the CHRC site also covers the negative aspects in our history, the highlights which I summarize here show how many of the human rights we take for granted in Canada have become a reality only semi-recently.

1918: Women received the right to voted federally (Caucasian women only)
1922: Married Women's Property Act (married women are allowed to own property)
1929: Women are legally considered persons.

[white christmas]

From my company's Christmas e-card Generator, with a message from me:

p.s. because we just merged with another company, I have no idea who is in charge of this...

p.p.s. Found out who designed the e-card generator. He told me the name of the graphic designer, who is in another country. I emailed the following to her on December 5th.

Hi _____:

I emailed _____ yesterday about the great e-card generator that he built. I really like the interface – easy to use, and fresh compared to the usual e-card sites.

The graphic design, which I understand you created, looks really sharp too – professional and yet warm and friendly. And the red half-transparent triangle nicely ties in with the red that is common at Christmas time too.

I do have a question. I’m with the new division, __________, in Canada. Our country is quite multi-cultural and in fact my own family is multi-racial. I was wondering if you could provide a second choice of graphic which, in terms of the people shown, better reflects our diversity?

Best regards,

Rob

* I welcome comments from readers on the card, the wisdom of writing (or not), the contents of my email, etc.

key terms related to exclusion and embrace

This is an ongoing collection of key terms and concepts that people should know and understand, to assist with understanding exclusion and embrace, diversity, and more. Most items are a brief introduction to the concept, with links to more detailed information or discussion.

concept: generous spaciousness*

This is an absolutely key concept, related to the "environment, climate, ethos within expressions of the Christian community as it pertains to engaging with gender and sexual minority persons."

Rather than providing a really brief explanation on this page, read more about generous spaciousness on its own post and then follow up by clicking some of the links on that page.

concept: privilege*

Google offers the following definition of privilege:
"A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to one person or group of people."

KJ Ward, writing at Black Girl Dangerous, defines privilege this way:
"unearned access to a bunch of good stuff and an arbitrarily granted protection from a bunch of bad stuff".

Accordingly, one might think of diplomatic immunity or the privileges that come with membership in an exclusive golf club or with first class plane tickets. But privilege as we are talking about it here is a more complex term, and one which is often difficult for those who are in privileged places to grasp. Let's use an example to illustrate it:

A white person goes into the store to get a birthday gift for their niece. Generally speaking, they never have to think about the following:
Will I be able to find a doll of the same race as my niece?
Will the store staff be worried that I'm going to steal things?
Will store security follow me around?

A black person or an aboriginal person goes into a store for the same purpose, and for them, these are often relevant questions!

Privilege is being able to live your life without ever having to think about such questions.

There are many kinds of privilege: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, Christian privilege, and others.

Read more about white privilege (including 50 daily effects of white privilege).
Read more about straight privilege (with parallels to the white privilege article).
Watch some amazing videos by Australian performance poet Joel McKerrow, as he says sorry for the white part in him, the rich part in him, the Christian part of him, and the masculine part of him.
Read Christena Cleveland about Killing Me Softly: On Privilege and Voice.
See also white fragility further down on this page.

holocaust

The American what?

When we hear the word "holocaust", we typically think of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II. This is also how Wikipedia defines the term "The Holocaust".

But there were other holocausts and other genocides, not only in far away countries but also right here in North America where I live, yet these are hardly mentioned. I am specifically referring to the holocaust of aboriginal people across the North American continent.

In the U.S. there are 36 museums commemorating the Nazi Holocaust. There are none commemorating the American Holocaust which killed millions of First Nations people....

[but I don't see you as asian]

In "But I Don’t See You as Asian: Curating Conversations About Race" Bruce Reyes-Chow curates a collection of cringe-inducing statements about race such as, “If they can say it, why can't I?" ” "Do you know martial arts?" and “He’s a different kind of Black,” hoping to turn awkward moments into a dialogue between friends.

Sitting in the sweet spot between lectures in academia and activism on the streets, Bruce invites the reader into a salon type of atmosphere where he directly addresses thoughtless words and diversionary tactics, such as dismissing racial discussions as being impolite or avoiding race conversations altogether. He invites the reader to chuckle, gasp, and perhaps nod in understanding as he lists the kinds of statements often used against persons of color in a predominantly white culture. But rather than stopping there, Bruce asks readers to swap shoes with him and reconsider their assumptions about race. Useful for individual reading, or as a tool for opening group and community discussions, "But I don't see you as Asian" puts one person’s joys and struggles on the table for dissection and discovery.

(description from Amazon)

Read an excerpt of the book and an interview with Bruce Reyes-Chow at redletterchristians.com.

Note: I haven't read this book -- it's just come out.

[jesus and the disinherited, by howard thurman]

"First published in 1949, Jesus and the Disinherited is a brilliant and compassionate look at God's work in our lives. As we struggle today with issues of poverty, racism, and spiritual disengagement, Howard Thurman's discerning reading of the message of renewal through self-love as exemplified in the life of Jesus resonates powerfully again.

Challenging our submersion into individual and social isolation, Thurman suggests a reading of the Gospel that recovers a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. He argues that within Jesus' life of suffering, pain, and overwhelming love is the solution that will prevent our descent into moral nihilism. For although scorned and forced to live outside society, Jesus advocated a love of self and others that defeats fear and the hatred that decays our souls and the world around us."

(from the back cover)

Howard Thurman was at college with Martin Luther King Sr., and it is said that Martin Luther King Jr. carried this book around with him. That along with the title is what caught my eye about this book. In a little over 100 pages, he says so much about this topic and discusses it in ways that I have not come across before. I will be reading it again, as soon as it is available from the library. Definitely recommended!

Jesus and the Disinherited
Howard Thurman
(Beacon Press, 1981).

[is it possible to be neutral?]

For an intriguing discussion of whether it is possible to remain neutral between two opposing sides and to simply seek to build bridges between them, with much reference to Martin Luther King and the ways in which he approached this, check out this article:

Is Prophetic Neutrality Possible? by David W. Congdon

A related quote from Elie Wiese: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

[alleluia]

Daniel Berrigan S.J., is a Catholic priest, peace activist, and poet. This story from his book, Love, love at the end ties in well with the themes of this site:

There was once a man who died, and rose again to life.

He had been a suburban man. He remembered trudging through the open fields, a Saturday in the country. Had he been struck by lightning? Had a bull charged him? He recalled a streak of horror coming through broken fences, crowned with daisies, demonic and bloodshot. His groin felt as though it had been ripped into by a scythe.

He stood up. No fields, no space, no landmarks. A city street. Cold. A musty doorway. His coat and face and hands covered with a dust of snow. Dazed and drunk, two legs under him like sticks of wood.

It was a city street, night, and infernal cold. The neon went off and on down the canyon, a bleary charade of eyes.

He shook like a dog, and took a few steps. The plate glass of a bar window drew him. He looked, and looked again. What was it, what face looked back? Black face? His mouth froze in a scream, his voice stuck in his throat. The neon winked him off and on, made and destroyed him,  the ugliest joke of all creation. A black face held him; it said like a bad joke, like a truthful ad; don't buy me. Danger. I'm poison. I don't beautify. Beware. No one recommends me, no family sings for me. Beware.

His hands went to his throat. A string of cheap beads. To his chest; two breasts. A whore's careless dress, a sack of anguish. A woman? Who died there? What arose there?

And then the neon took voice, the night erupted. A band of herald angels rose from the sewers, from the skies, sang this birth. "Welcome, sister, to a new skin. Welcome to the other side. Why, you're now two-thirds of all of us; black. The other half of us, woman. Black woman. What piety, what merits won this rebirth?" For country acres, for country matters, for wise polity, for good acts and good investments, this reward. For that I was hungry and you knew me not, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. Welcome. Not to punishment, not to hell. To a new chance. To a new body, to the new city.

Now, at length, I love you. Now I choose you. Welcome, outcast, reject, welcome to cold and fear and exhaustion and the dead end of corrupt hope. I anoint you and summon you, I kiss you with the kiss of my lips. Arise my love, my dove, my beautiful one.

Love, love at the end by Daniel Berrigan, S.J. (pp. 23-24)

the right side of history

"Here's the funny thing about history: sometimes you can't tell you're on the wrong side of it, especially when it's being made."
John Boyle, Citizen Times, Aug 11/12 (source)

Here is a review of history, and some of the times that the church has been on the wrong side of it. Note that in most cases, there were also believers on the right side of history, but it seems it took quite some time before that became clear to all involved.


Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, in an article about Evangelicals and the Wrong Side of History, says the following:

While evangelicals used Bible verses to deny women the right to vote, a very religious Fredrick Douglass and the suffrage movement used the Bible to support the full enfranchisment of women.

... the largest and most powerful evangelical denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, does not allow women to serve as pastors and through its lobbying arm has supported anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, and anti-immigrant agendas.

Rev. Billy Graham is another example of the evangelical tendency to lag behind in social progress. Rev. Graham, the undisputed leader of American evangelicalism for the past five decades, used a biblical argument to support the passage of North Carolina constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.... In the same manner, Graham refused to denounce segregation after a direct appeal from Dr. King in 1957. (source and full article)

150 years ago	100 years ago	50 years ago	Today
Abolishment of slavery	Suffragette / right to vote	Desegregation	Marriage equality / civil rights for LGBT people
Churches used the bible to defend slavery	Churches used the bible to keep women "in their place" and deny the right to vote	Churches used the bible to justify lesser status of blacks	Churches use the bible to put down lgbt people

Most Christians, looking back at history, would be loathe to return to the days when black people were enslaved, aboriginal people were beaten down, women had no vote and so on. In other words, they now accept that history was right. Yet in today's current hot issue – the acceptance of gay and lesbian people, they fight and object and "stand firm".

[mea culpa]

I would like to confess my prejudices which are known to me:

1.
The other day I heard the mental health hotline joke, which someone read from the web. It starts like this:

You have reached the mental health hotline.
If you have obsessive compulsive disorder, press 1 repeatedly.
If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.
If you have multiple personality disorder, press 3, 4, 5, and 6.
and so on...

Then when they got to the line about dyslexia, I thought to myself, how would someone who has dyslexia feel about this? And only later did I ask myself, why didn't I ask myself that when I heard the line about OCD or co-dependency or MPD? Is it okay to make fun of people with mental health issues but not those with learning challenges? It seems that part of me at least partly thinks so some of the time (I say some of the time because if someone was actively and agressively making fun of someone with a mental illness, I would of course object. But many of our prejudices are more subtle in how they show their face).

2.
I came across an interesting article called Everything I Need to Know About Hospitality, I Learned from Molly Weasley which I was going to share on Facebook. I clicked on the author's name to read other articles she had written, and discovered that she is Mormon. And then I became reluctant to share the article.

In thinking about this, I determined that if the author was Jewish I would not have hesitated, and probably not either if she was Muslim. So why hesitate because she's Mormon?
 
3.
Finally, I realize that I have prejudices against a particular ethnic group. I would be okay interacting with an individual from that group, but that I hold misperceptions or stereotypes about that group. Some of this may have come from the Winnipeg neighbourhood where I lived during childhood, where there were many people from this group and where it bothered me that many of the men drove a particular sporty car (no, not a Lamborghini :-) while their families lived in run-down houses. I don't think there is a problem in being concerned about how people use their money, but retrospectively, I think that I judged them for it and that I did not understand the importance of the cars in their particular culture.

How about you? In what ways are you prejudiced against others?

Where's the line between friendly joking about something and hurtful joking?

[Ku Klux Clowns in East Tennessee]

Here's a great story of how hatred was met with humour:

Word had begun to spread that a group of white supremacists, including members of the KKK, were converging here in Knoxville, TN, holding a rally in a park downtown. It was in the news and papers. Many locals were pretty upset by the public display of racism and hatred. Even though many of the folks connected to the hate-group were coming from other states, they had obtained a permit to gather and publicly proclaim their hate-filled message of White Power.

But they had no idea what was coming.

A group of locals had decided neither to cower away in fear nor to fight fire with fire…. Instead they decided to meet hatred with humor.....

Read the rest of the story by Shane Claiborne.

This event has inspired a children's book White Flour by David LaMotte, which is available in hard cover and perhaps e-book format. Check out White Flour Book for more information, plus a copy of the poem, a video of the book's author reading the poem, and more.

colour-blind society

The cartoon takes the literal meaning of "colour" and therefore allows the speaker to like a society with black people and white people, but not (for example) red people and green people.

In the real world, colour-blindness is generally meant to indicate that a person is blind to the race of others. This is sometimes presented as a positive, but can actually be a problem. As Derald W. Sue from the Teachers College at Columbia University writes,

I have come to realize that color blindness uses "whiteness" as the default key and mimics the norms of fairness, justice, and equity by "whiting" out differences and perpetuating the belief in sameness and equality. The denial of power imbalance, unearned privilege, and racial discrimination is couched in the rhetoric of equal treatment and equal opportunity. The pretense of not seeing color is motivated by self deception. To be colorblind not only denies the central importance of racial differences in the psychological experience of minorities (racism and discrimination), but also allows the White person to deny how his or her whiteness intrudes upon the person of color.

Read the rest of this short article online:
The Color Blind Society: Whiteness as the Default Standard

[man in black]

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who is long paid for his crime
But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a Man In Black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin' that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
Believin' that we all were on their side

Well, there's things that never will be right I know
And things need changin' everywhere you go
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right
You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day
And tell the world that everything's okay
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black



"Man in Black" by Johnny Cash (from Man in Black album, 1971)
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

[joel mckerrow :: confession for the white part in me]

"Joel McKerrow is an international touring performance poet, writer, educator, youth worker, thinker and activist based out of Melbourne, Australia. He is the founder of ‘The Centre for Poetics and Justice’ (www.cpj.org.au/), a not-for-profit, community arts organisation focused on using poetics as a form of literary education, self-expression and social engagement for marginalised teenagers." (from his website).

 What Joel confesses in these videos fits perfectly with this site, in terms of addressing marginalization and in terms of saying sorry for what has been done from positions of power and privilege. These are amazing videos -- both in terms of the confessions being made, the speaking of them, and the appropriately artistic videography.

The four videos in the series:
my confession part 1: for the white part in me (featured above)

my confession part 2: for the rich part in me

my confession part 3: for the Christian part of me

my confession part 4: for the masculine part of me

---

For those of you living near Edmonton, Joel will be part of an evening event on Thursday, August 2nd at the Bleeding Heart Arts Space.

[the gospel of Rutba]

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove tells this amazing story of embracing one's enemy:

During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Leah and I traveled with the Christian Peacemaker Teams to Baghdad, believing that the way of Jesus called us to interrupt the unjust war our country was initiating. Three days after U.S. planes bombed the hospital in Rutba, our American friends’ car hit a piece of shrapnel on the highway outside of town and landed in a side ditch. Iraqis stopped by the roadside, took our bleeding friends into their car, and drove them to a doctor in Rutba. “Three days ago your country bombed our hospital,” he said, “but we will take care of you.” He sewed up their heads and saved their lives. When we asked the doctor what we owed him for his services, he only said, “Please, go tell the world what is happening in Rutba.”

The more we told the story, the more it sounded like a modern day Good Samaritan story. A good Iraqi—a good Muslim—not only saved our friends’ lives; he also showed us what God’s love looks like. We can’t be saved apart from the stranger, even the stranger who seems to be our enemy. The gospel of Rutba is that hope lies in the “enemy.”

Read the rest of Jonathan's post about The Gospel of Rutba (on his blog)

Check out the Gospel of Rutba website and read the book.

defining hate

Would you believe the slave owner who says that he does not hate his slaves? Would you even need to ask the slaves their opinion on this question? Or would you say that owning someone is inherently hateful regardless of whether you "take good care of them" or not?

Who defines hate - the powerless or the powerful?

historical hiccup

History repeats. With the occasional hiccup, the extraordinary disruption that changes everything, but unfortunately not everyone....

men's daily prayers

This one was inspired by reading about the prayer that Jewish men actually prayed for years (and some might still pray?), and then taking it from there. Of course, some of the things the man on the left is praying could readily be the view of the man on the right as well -- we are just not as open about it as they were in Old Testament times.

Are we making progress?