Category: Justice
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Tornillo: The Turning of the Screw
Tornillo. In Spanish it means screw – as in turning the screw – as in taking something bad and making it worse. That is exactly what has happened in this place. Tonight I stood before the closed gate to the Tornillo-Guadelupe Port of Entry, beyond which sits the newly populated “tent cities” for children separated…
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At least there was a baby to clothe…
Searching through the racks of baby clothes at Factory 2 U, only one thought was running through my mind: thank God they are together. The thought of the alternative made my stomach contort itself into knots. Five days earlier, I had knelt on the ground on the Mexico side of the Deconcini Port of Entry,…
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Grief on Both Sides of the Border this Mother’s Day
On May 10th, the Thursday before Mother’s Day, Mothers from throughout the United States plan to converge on the Capitol for #STAND, a Day of Action organized to demand legislation and reforms that would address the police brutality experienced by their loved ones. As they gather at the center of the nation’s power, thousands of…
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Preach the Disruptive Gospel
A word for my clergy colleagues: We do not have to decide whether or not we will be “political.” We simply have to wake up each morning and answer the same question we have every other day of our careers, be it 10 years or 50 years: will I preach the Gospel today? If that…
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When We Cannot Say Her Name
On the Sonora, Mexico side of the border wall running through Nogales, I bent over to pick up a white cross from the dust. “Girl, 18, Mexico,” it read. Two words and a number, all that was left of a life cut short by this desert whose dangers we make light of as “a dry…
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Good Men, Me Too, and the Rise of Nazism
At 5:07 am this Friday, October 20, the Nazi who attacked me in Houston back in January was booked into a jail in Alachua County, Florida. He was charged with attempted homicide in the first degree. His bail was set at one million dollars. He and two other Nazis had shot at protestors speaking up…
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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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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…
Hannah Adair Bonner 