The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since. Did this social location mean Blac...
Updated for 2026. January 19, 2026 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day— the only U.S. national holiday commemorating a pastor. Under his leadership, non-violent civil rights advocacy achieved leaps f...
My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...
In sovereign love, you, O God, created the world good And made everyone equally in your image, Male and female, of every race and people, To live as one community. But we rebel against you; we hid...
Leader: “Now there are various kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are various kinds of service, and the same Lord.” People: “ For as the body is one, and has many members, and all the members...
O God, we thank thee thou that hast made man in thine own image. Help us to see ourselves as thou seest us, all standing in need of thy mercy yet dear unto thee. We confess to the many injustices and ...
Leader: How shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the exalted God? People: The Lord has shown you, O man, what is good. Leader: What does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, P...
In Mendenhall, where the schools have actually integrated, we are seeing real equality form in the hearts of members of this new generation, and it is enriching for the entire community. When the scho...
Six of my children—Spencer, Joanie, Phillip, Derek, Deborah, and Wayne—were among the first black children to attend the all-white school in Mendenhall. But while they were there, their white teachers...
Today the public school system in Jackson is about 98 percent black. Some of this resegregation came about simply because of where people live—after all, the population of Jackson is about 80 percent ...
The etymology of the word race, as used with regard to people, can be traced only to the sixteenth century. Around 1500 the English word race carried the sense of a group with a common occupation; by ...
No writer has had a greater impact on my understanding of cultural identity than Dr. Beverly Tatum. …When introducing cultural identity (or racial identity, a term she uses synonymously), Tatum tells...
Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become fri...
The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bib...
In January 1999 I was flying on Saudi Arabian Airlines from Mumbai, India, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then onward to London. I arrived at the Mumbai airport to find a long line. Perhaps seventy-five...
In a recent Barna survey, only 56 percent of evangelicals agree that people of color are often placed at a social disadvantage, lower than the national average of 67 percent. At the same time, 95 perc...
The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...
In the 1940s, two black psychologists who were married to each other, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were instrumental in the civil rights movement, conducting important research about the effects of race a...
Many minorities actually try to change their appearance to look more light-skinned or white. Eliza Noh, assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University of Fullerton descri...
The creation of a white standard in the world during the age of exploration, and the white structural privilege prevalent for so long in America, led to what is often called “white privilege”. This is...
“The Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii erupted on May 17, 2018, at 4:17 a.m., spewing lava more than a thousand feet in the air. Homes and other structures in the wake of the lava flow and the eruption’s rela...
In this excerpt by Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, explains the origins of racial identity and difference, necessitated by a slave-based (American Christian) socie...
While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...
In his seminal work, the Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois describes the unique challenge to identity one faces being both Black and American. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-conscious...
Editors Note: This is perhaps less a review as a jumping off part to articulate some thoughts I developed while reading The Minority Experience. For a full review of the title, a cursory google search...
In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...
It was a cold December weekend in Chicago, and I was excited. One of my best friends was getting married, and to top it off, he had asked me to officiate the wedding. I was honored by the invitation, ...