Forgetting Lynching at Our Peril

My third grader is a white child in a Title I school in our town. She’s writing a report on Harriet Tubman for her Black History month project and has spent the week devouring information about Tubman and proudly sharing stories and facts about her life with our whole family. “Mom, did you know Harriet Tubman was a spy during the Civil War!” We have spent the week talking together about Tubman, slavery, and the history of racism in the South. As a white mother of two white daughters, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to educate my children about history and slavery and how each of these continue to shape the racism in our communities and in our lives.

It is imperative that I teach my children that their white skin is a privilege in a country where brown people are discriminated against in both conscious and unconscious ways. But, talking about privilege is hard, and not just for parents. For most people with privilege, talking about it makes us uncomfortable. Admitting that we have privilege seems unseemly at best, but worse than that, for many of us, it feels arrogant. The fact that people have difficulty even recognizing their own privilege is well documented and one of the reasons that privilege is so hard to address as a cultural phenomenon. For starters, how do I teach my children about social privilege without reinforcing social privilege? Well, its not easy, but it certainly won’t happen if we ignore it or pretend like we don’t have it.

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Progressive Christian Ethics

I am a Christian social ethicist by training and by vocation. In a highly secular world people often wonder what that means. Am I the church police, there to tell people how to behave? Am I the wise counselor, there to offer advice on how to live morally? Or, am I, simply there to make Christians feel guilty about engaging in behavior they already know is morally wrong?

Well, thankfully, my job is none of those things. When I explain that my work is focused on questions of social ethics and contemporary society, questions related to economics, the environmental crisis, globalization, poverty, and women’s access to reproductive health care – people often wonder why I bother with the Christian part. I mean, after all, aren’t those social questions matters for public debate in a public forum, a place where the church should keep its nose out? Certainly it is true, there is nothing particularly “Christian” about any of these social issues or about how we as a society should seek to address them.

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