Roland Martin and Mark Thompson, host of SiriusXM’s “Make It Plain” discussed the lack of voter mobilization programs that specifically target African American men after the success of the push to mobilize Black women voters in Alabama.
Video Courtesy of Roland S. Martin.
In America’s children, we often see hope for a better future, especially when it comes to reducing racism.
Each new generation of white people, the thinking goes, will naturally and inevitably be more open-minded and tolerant than previous ones.
But do we have any reason to believe this? Should we have faith that today’s white kids will help make our society less racist and more equitable?
Previous research has had mixed findings. So in order to explore more fully what white kids think about race, I went straight to the source: white children themselves.
In my new book, “White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America,” I explore how 36 white, affluent kids think and talk about race, racism, privilege and inequality in their everyday lives.
Before beginning my research, I looked at what previous studies on the racial attitudes of young white people had found.
According to some researchers, we do have reason to be hopeful.
Using survey data, they found that young white people are expressing less prejudice than generations before them. For instance, white support for segregated schools – a traditional measure of racial prejudice – has dramatically decreased over a 50-year period. And surveys show that younger whites are less likely to express racial stereotypes than older whites.
But a second group of researchers disagreed. They found that whites today simply articulate racial prejudice in new ways.
For example, according to national survey data, high school seniors are increasingly expressing a form of prejudice that sociologist Tyrone Forman calls “racial apathy” – an “indifference toward societal, racial, and ethnic inequality and lack of engagement with race-related social issues.”
Racial apathy is a more passive form of prejudice than explicit articulations of bigotry and racial hostility. But such apathy can nonetheless lead white people to support policies and practices that align with the same racist logic of the past, like a lack of support for social programs and policies designed to address institutional racism or an indifference toward the suffering of people of color.
Other researchers question the ability of surveys to capture honest responses from whites about race-related questions or to describe the complexity of whites’ perspectives on race.
As useful as surveys can be, they don’t allow us to fully understand how white people explain, justify or develop their views on race.
In order to better understand how white children think about race, I interviewed and observed 30 affluent, white families with kids between the ages of 10 and 13 living in a Midwestern metropolitan area. Over the course of two years, I immersed myself in the everyday lives of these families, observing them in public and in the home, and interviewing the parents and the kids. A few years later, when the kids were in high school, I re-interviewed a subset of the original group.
These children had some shared understandings of race, like the idea that “race is the color of your skin.” But when I brought up topics like racism, privilege and inequality, their responses started to diverge, and there was more variation than I anticipated.
Some kids told me that “racism is not a problem anymore.” But others told me in great detail about the racial wealth gap, employment discrimination, unequal schooling, and racist treatment of black kids by police.
As an 11-year-old named Chris explained:
“I think that the white kids, since they have more power in general in society … disciplinary actions aren’t brought down as hard upon them. But when it’s, you know, a black kid getting in trouble with the police … I think people are going to be tougher with them, because, you know, [black kids] can’t really fight back as well.”
Although some of the kids had much greater understandings of the history of racism in America, others flattened time and lumped all of African-American history together, while also mixing up names and dates.
One 11-year-old named Natalie told me:
“Racism was a problem when all those slaves were around and that, like, bus thing and the water fountain. I mean, everything was crazy back in the olden days. … But now, I mean, since Martin Luther King and, like, Eleanor Roosevelt, and how she went on the bus. And she was African-American and sat on the white part. … After the 1920s and all that, things changed.”
When it came to the understandings of privilege and inequality, some kids made comments like, “There’s no such thing [as privilege]. Everyone gets what they deserve in life, if they work for it.”
Other kids disagreed, like 11-year-old Aaron:
“I think [whites] just kind of have the upside. … And since much of society is run by white people anyway, which is an upside, more white people are, you know, accepted into jobs, so they get the upside. So, yeah, I do think they have the upside.”
I also found that many of the children expressed forms of racial apathy. When a black teenager was shot and killed by a police officer in the community, 16-year-old Jessica told me that she “did not care” about black people being killed because they “obviously did something to deserve it.”
But some kids, like 16-year-old Charlotte, had a very different reaction:
“It should all be stopped. There is actually a problem and a system that allowed this to happen. … Technically, legally, what that officer did was ‘okay’? It’s like, well, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe killing black people shouldn’t be legally ‘okay,’ you know?”
Why such stark differences among these kids?
It wasn’t simply a matter of these kids repeating the views of their parents.
I found that their perspectives were shaped less by what their parents explicitly said about race and more by the social environments these kids grew up in – and how their parents constructed these environments.
Decisions parents made about where to live, where to send their kids to school, which extracurricular activities to enroll them in, where they traveled and what media they consumed work to create what I refer to as a child’s “racial context of childhood.”
Within this racial context, kids developed ideas about race by observing and interpreting what was going on around them. And because of important variations in these social environments, the children made sense of race in different ways.
In this sense, my work builds on existing scholarship on how children develop understandings about race and racism in the context of family, place, early school experiences,elementary and secondary schools, child care and even summer camp.
All of these aspects of a child’s social environment play a role in shaping how they learn about race.
Are white kids less racist than their grandparents? My research with kids doesn’t give us any reason to believe that each new generation of white people will naturally or inevitably hold more open-minded and tolerant viewpoints on race than previous generations.
Dismantling racism in the United States will require more than just passive hope.
Margaret Hagerman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Mississippi State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Minister and elder Sammie L. Berry talks with the news media after a Sept. 9, 2018, worship assembly at the Dallas West Church of Christ, Botham Jean’s home congregation. RNS photo by Bobby Ross Jr.
The preacher stood wearily on stage, wiping tears from his eyes.
The mayor, working to bring healing to a city of 1.3 million, sought solace on a front pew.
Allison Jean, mourning the fatal shooting of her son Botham Shem Jean by a police officer, wailed as the 250-member, predominantly black congregation sang hymns such as “Trouble in My Way.”
“I know that Jesus — Jesus— he will fix it after a while,” the church sang.
Television and newspaper cameras captured the emotion — and the heartbreak — as the Dallas West Church of Christ gathered to worship just days after the inexplicable killing of 26-year-old Botham Jean in his own apartment.
The recent Sunday was no ordinary Lord’s Day for the congregation, which was grieving the sudden loss of a beloved song leader and Bible class teacher — and doing so under an immense media spotlight stretching from Texas all the way to the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia.
Attorney Lee Merritt, left, with Botham Jean’s mother, Allison Jean, to his right, speaks to the news media at the Dallas West Church of Christ after a prayer vigil on Sept. 8, 2018. RNS photo by Bobby Ross Jr.
“Somebody like Bo — why?” church member Sherron Rodgers said, uttering the question on everybody’s mind. “Why did it happen to somebody like him? I’m just sad.
“He was a special, kind person who would never mess with anybody,” she added. “He’d take off his jacket and give it to you. That’s the kind of person he was.”
According to those who knew him, Botham Jean was a devoted man of faith with a “beautiful” and “powerful” singing voice.
He was baptized at age 10 in his native St. Lucia and moved to the U.S. at age 19 to attend Harding University, a Christian liberal arts university in Searcy, Ark. He often led worship at Harding’s daily chapel assembly and served for three years as a ministry intern with the nearby College Church of Christ.
Allison Jean, right, mother of shooting victim Botham Jean, hugs a mourner after a prayer vigil Sept. 8, 2018, at the Dallas West Church of Christ. RNS photo by Bobby Ross Jr.
Officer Amber Guyger, who lived in the same apartment complex as Botham Jean, was charged Sept. 9 with manslaughter and booked into jail before posting bond.
According to an arrest affidavit filed by Texas Ranger peace officer David L. Armstrong, Guyger worked her shift Sept. 6 and then returned home. At the apartment complex’s multi-level garage, she parked on the wrong floor and then mistook Botham Jean’s home for her own. After entering through his slightly ajar door, she confused him with a burglar and opened fire.
But for the victim’s mother, a former top government official in St. Lucia, many perplexing questions remain. The official narrative about how her son died doesn’t make sense.
“The No. 1 answer I want is: What happened?” said Allison Jean, who was joined at a recent news conference by attorneys and Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of St. Lucia, a nation of 178,000 people. “I have asked too many questions and been told there are no answers yet.”
At the microphone, Allison Jean was flanked by Botham Jean’s older sister, Allisa Findley, and his younger brother, Brandt. Noting that Botham Jean was her middle child, the mother said, “I stand in the middle to represent Botham.”
Botham Jean’s death has refocused national attention — and even international attention, given the St. Lucia connection — on police shootings of unarmed black males by white police officers.
Students, faculty and staff at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., gather Sept. 10, 2018, on the university’s Benson Auditorium steps to grieve and remember alumnus Botham Jean. Photo by Noah Darnell, courtesy of Harding University
This week, a group of Dallas religious leaders, including megachurch pastors Matt Chandler of the Village Church and T.D. Jakes of the Potter’s House, wrote a letter expressing grief over Botham’s death and calling for “fair, consistent application of the law” in the investigation. Guyger’s status as a police officer should give her “no advantage in the current investigation nor upcoming prosecution.”
“We demand full transparency, consistency, and integrity in the days ahead as the judicial process progresses,” they wrote.
A criminal investigation is ongoing. So far, Guyger has not faced disciplinary action from the Dallas Police Department for the shooting.
“An exhaustive and thorough criminal investigation is essential, and as soon as we are assured that conducting an administrative investigation will not impede on the criminal investigation, we will proceed,” Dallas Police Chief U. Reneé Hall said in a statement this week.
At the Dallas West Church of Christ, minister Sammie L. Berry said the congregation will work to support the family and make sure justice is served.
“Bo was an outstanding young man,” Berry said of Botham Jean, who had started preaching occasionally on Sunday nights. “You just can’t think of how this could happen to him. I mean, all he did was go to work, go to church, help people.
“We’re going to make sure that his name is lifted up. We’re going to make sure that we get answers to what happened,” the minister added. “We won’t allow this to be just brushed to the side and move on to the next case. He meant too much to his family. He meant too much to this congregation, to his college, to the place where he worked.”Allison Jean told the congregation at a prayer vigil that her middle son “did everything with a passion,” including serving the Lord.
“I can never give up because I know that Botham is singing with the angels, and I want to be in that choir,” she said. “I want to see my son. I want to look upon his face.”
When Botham Jean was born in 1991, his mother said, “God gave me an angel.”
While much of the national conversation focuses on race, she said Botham Jean “never saw color. He never saw race. He wanted all of us to unite, to be together.”
Mike Rawlings. Photo courtesy of City of Dallas
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, who earlier met with Botham Jean’s family to express his condolences, stayed for the entire two-hour Sunday service.
At the end of the service, Rawlings told the congregation he came not in an official capacity but as a citizen, “wanting to soothe some of my hurt because the city of Dallas is hurting so bad.
“To be able to sing with you, to be able to pray with you, to be able to listen to this wonderful sermon was just what I needed because I feel like, as mayor, I’m in the perfect storm,” he said.
The mayor drew cheers when he agreed with Berry that “we all need to be like Bo.”
“God bless you,” Rawlings said as he wrapped up his remarks. “Let us pull together. We will be a better city once we know the truth and once we come together and heal.”
Tommy Bush, a retired executive minister, works with a small congregation in Romance, Ark., an unincorporated community about 20 miles west of Searcy.
Bush, 70, served as a professional mentor to Botham Jean his senior year in college and helped the accounting graduate land a job with PwC, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, in Dallas.
The two became close friends and worked together to support missions in St. Lucia and Kenya.
“His theology — his philosophy — was to get as good a job as he could and to make money to be able to give,” said Bush, who came to worship with the Dallas West church and comfort Botham Jean’s family. “He had great ideas for serving poor children and orphans in St. Lucia.”
Bush said he prays the charged officer knows Jesus.
“I just hope that she has the indwelling presence of Christ,” Bush said, breaking into tears, “because Botham will be the first one in line to give her a hug and welcome her home.”
(Bobby Ross Jr. writes for the Christian Chronicle.)
“Can you love your neighbor as yourself, and at the same time knee him in the face as hard as you can?” American Christian Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) champion Scott “Bam Bam” Sullivan wonders in an interview with The Times (London).
Today over 700 evangelical US churches now integrate MMA (also known as cage-fighting) into their ministry programs. The phenomenon has even been featured in a recent documentary film, 2014’s Fight Church.
MMA is a combination of kickboxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Greco-Roman wrestling and Thai boxing. Fighters face off against one another, brutally inflicting pain by punching, kicking, kneeing, and elbowing their opponents into submission. The intensity of the sport’s violence caused the late Senator John McCain to call for an outright ban on MMA in the US. He denounced it as “human cockfighting,” a “blood sport,” and a “blood bath.”
The notion that MMA and Christianity are compatible bedfellows is loosely based on the ideology of Muscular Christianity, a mostly-male, Victorian-era movement that linked the gospel with physical and mental toughness. Two leaders of the movement – Charles Kingsley, a clergymen and scholar, and Thomas Hughes, a celebrated Victorian era author (and boxing coach) – sought to counter the perceived feminization of church and to attract men to the faith.
The muscular Christian ethos was instrumental in the birth of modern sport, particularly in late 19th century British public schools. However, there was a marked decline in an institutional sport-faith link, which lasted until the 1950s. Then Protestant Christian leaders like Billy Graham saw sport as a potential evangelical tool and rekindled the church’s promotion of it.
Since the mid-20th century numerous sport ministry organizations have been formed, such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the US and Christians in Sport in the UK.
Muscular Christianity originated in 19th century England. Wikimedia Commons
Like their Victorian forefathers, these organizations champion sport as a way to attract young men to faith in an age when the decline of church male membership has been well-documented. Yet MMA religious communities have refashioned Muscular Christianity to a new level of high-octane biblical masculinity.
“Jesus Didn’t Tap,” they proclaim, referring to the act of submission.
It’s this perception of “Jesus as fighter” that is at the heart of the Christian MMA ethos, one eagerly embraced by Mark Driscoll, a well-known, US-based evangelical pastor and MMA supporter.
“I don’t think that there is anything purer than putting two men in a cage…and just seeing which man is better,” Driscoll said. “And as a pastor, as a bible teacher, I think God made men masculine… Men are made for combat, men are made for conflict, men are made for dominion.”
A moment’s theological reflection, however, raises a host of ethical quandaries and paradoxes for the theologian or thoughtful Christian.
Core biblical teachings challenge the uncritical acceptance and justification of MMA. According to the Bible, humans are made in the image of God – imago Dei – and thus, in the sight of God, human personhood has incredible grandeur and dignity. Second, the centrality of the call to non-violence in the teachings of Jesus seems to be fundamentally incompatible with MMA. Finally, if the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), what would be the theological basis for the acceptance of brutal and intentional violence against the body and soul (Matt 6:22-23) in MMA competition?
In addition to the theological objections to MMA, there’s a wealth of medical evidence that demonstrates the risk of traumatic brain injury, psychiatric conditions, concussion, irreversible neurological dysfunction and even death. Both the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association have repeatedly called for a ban on boxing and, more recently, MMA.
In response, advocates of MMA and boxing often champion the “character-building” qualities of the sport, suggesting they can foster discipline, a strong work ethic, respect for self and others, and offer “anger management therapy” for alienated young men.
Those in the pro-MMA (and boxing) camp are also quick to point out that deaths, in absolute terms, are higher in other high-risk sporting activities, such as sky diving, rugby, American football and horse racing. But what differentiates MMA (and boxing) from these other sports is that the principal aim within the rules is to inflict violence on one’s opponent to win. Conversely, while a participant playing American football or rugby could be seriously injured (or killed) from the sport’s inherent violence, the intention (ideally) is to merely stop the opposing player from advancing into one’s own territory.
Nonetheless, contradictions abound. When considering the theological and medical evidence and the principal objectives of MMA, how can Christian MMA participants use scripture to justify their actions? What do they make of the fact that many other sporting activities are physically demanding, involve physical contact, and can assist in character development – but do not involve intentionally beating one’s opponent into submission? How do they reconcile their faith and the health risks of this brutal sport: brain bleeds, varying levels of concussion, death, emotional trauma and a hardening of heart?
Some admit as much. As Christian MMA champion, Scott ‘Bam Bam’ Sullivan conceded, “fighting just didn’t jibe with my prayer life”; MMA bouts, he said, “foster a brutal mind-set.”
Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and a professional boxing coach, has written extensively on boxing, and, more recently, MMA. He interviewed boxing champion (and devout Christian) Manny Pacquiao, and introduced the theological dilemma: is boxing (MMA) sinful? Marino recalled:
Before a recent bout, I pressed Pacquiao about the apparent conflict between his devotion to the God-man who insisted that we turn the other cheek and his concussive craft. There was a silence. I was worried that I stepped over the line and said, “I’m sorry if I offended you with that question.” The Pac Man responded, “No it is a good question. I think it is wrong that we try to hurt one another, but I also think that God will forgive us (him and his opponent) because it is our calling.” I could have pushed, “But why would God give you a calling that was sinful?” but instead I back peddled and left it at that – that is, at ambivalence.
Yet for other religious boxers and Christian MMA fighters, the ambivalence is lost. Pastor John Renken is a modern-day muscular Christian and founder of a Nashville church called Xtreme Ministries. MMA, he argues, acts as a manly expression of devotion. It’s a place “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”
Nick Watson, Senior Lecturer, Sport, Culture and Religion, York St John University and Brian Bolt, Chair of Kinesiology, Calvin College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Arthur Mitchell, who broke barriers for African-Americans in the 1950s as a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet and who would go on to become a driving force in the creation of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, has died. He was 84.
Mitchell died Wednesday at a New York City hospital according to his niece, Juli Mills-Ross. She said the death came after renal failure led to heart failure.
Born in Harlem, Mitchell started dancing with the New York City Ballet in 1955 under famed choreographer George Balanchine.
Arthur Mitchell, co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, is interviewed in New York, Thursday Oct. 21, 2004, when a $2.4 million shortfall forced him to cancel the company’s season and was about to close its school. In late November 2004, six week after the school closed, the 70-year-old ballet master announced that classes would start again with the help of $1.6 million in donations. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
Balanchine put him in several leading roles, including one pairing him with a white female dancer in “Agon” in 1957.
In a January interview with The New York Times, Mitchell recalled the daring of that choice.
“Can you imagine the audacity to take an African-American and Diana Adams, the essence and purity of Caucasian dance, and to put them together on the stage?” he said.
In 1968, impacted by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Mitchell started a dance school that grew the next year to include the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
Anna Glass, the executive director of the Dance Theater, told The Associated Press that Mitchell “truly was a visionary.”
“He believed in a world where all people could have access to this beautiful art form,” she said. “He really sought to ensure that all people saw themselves in” ballet.
Among those recognizing his impact following his death was Misty Copeland, the first African-American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre.
In a post on Instagram, she wrote, “You gave me so much, through our conversations, your dancing and by simply existing as a brown body in ballet. But you were so much more than a brown body. You’re an icon and hero.”
Choreographer and television producer Debbie Allen tweeted, “The world has lost another visionary” with Mitchell’s death.
“Arthur Mitchell claimed ballet as an American art form,” she said. “His legacy lives through all of us.”
Mitchell was born in 1934, and grew up with four siblings. He started formal dance training in high school, and upon graduating, took the offer of a ballet scholarship with the School of American Ballet, founded by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein.
His dancing years also included choreographing his own works, performing on Broadway, and working with dance companies in other countries. The Dance Theatre of Harlem performed internationally and has been artistically acclaimed even as it went through some periods of financial upheaval. He stepped down as director almost a decade ago.
Glass said Mitchell had most recently spent time at the company last month, during a two-week residency in which he restaged one of his older ballets to be performed next April as the company marks its 50th anniversary.
“This was a moment that all of us were looking forward to,” Glass said. “I know we will miss him tremendously.”