Category: Featured
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To those that said “Me too” and those that thought it…
The other day, I was walking down the street in my clergy collar and dress slacks, when a man with a white beard drove up. He was yelling something at me and so I turned to listen better, thinking he may need directions. “That’s a nice ass you’ve got,” he hollered. “Why don’t you get…
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The Super-Virus of White Nationalism
White Nationalism and White Supremacy are not identical beasts. I am not sure if I could explain why, but I could feel it in my bones facing him. It felt as if we have been treating White Supremacy with too many antibiotics and had created a drug-resistant super-virus. It felt as if our desire to…
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Let’s Not “Make Feminism Great Again”: An Open Letter to Emma-Kate Symons
My dear sisters, There is a feeling that has been building in me for weeks. Maybe months. A concern that in our own woundedness, we will wound others. It is a concern well founded in our previous behavior. From the racism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton ( ‘We educated, virtuous white women are more worthy of the…
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64 Hours for Sandra Bland: The First Night
“You’re going to be arrested tomorrow,” my neighbor said to me solemnly. Sitting on the front stoop of his house, the street was silent. The laughter and mariachi music from the birthday party down the block had long since morphed into a pile of tables and chairs awaiting pick-up. Only a few neighborhood dogs walking their patrol kept…
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When Politics Trumped Faith
As a child, I was taught that the most important characteristic about a political candidate was their faith: as a Christian nation, we needed Christian leaders, preferably born again and evangelical. Learning to swim in waters so thick with political convictions and action, it felt at times as though the world around me inhaled religion and…
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Jesus the Criminal
Sitting here at the Waller County Jail in hour 44 of the 64 that Sandra Bland spent here before news of her death broke on July 13; making sure her voice is heard here throughout the duration. Sitting here a week after the indefensible killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile; as well as a…
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Imagine A World Where Women Matter
*This piece is written from the perspective of a white woman who attended a heavily privileged Southern institution of higher learning. It in no way captures the plight of women involved in other conversations about male privilege such as the #RapedAtSpelman advocacy work being done. When I was in college, I was afraid of boys who looked like Brock…
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The Distortion of “What Happened To Sandra Bland?”
The cover article of the May 9-16th issue of The Nation Magazine is an article entitled “What Happened To Sandra Bland?” It takes the words first used by alumni of Prairie View A&M University who were mourning Sandra Bland the week of her death, and ultimately used to express a movement, and repurposes them to make…
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Man Interrupted: Accountability as Apology
*Satire. Written with our deepest apologies to Sheriff R. Glenn Smith, Brian Encinia, Daniel Willis, Dante Servin and all the many law enforcement officials who have suffered due to the death of black women. You have suffered so many small inconveniences, and temporary life interruptions, yet all we have done is think of the bereaved families of the…
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The American Reformation
PART 1: The American Reformation Begins Not all Revolutions begin with a Declaration, and not all Reformations begin with a list of Theses. The Reformation of the Methodist church in the United States began with prayer. In 1787, ten years after Thomas Jefferson penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all…
Hannah Adair Bonner 