Could the purpose of telling so selective a version of Greenwood’s story be to erase its real history?
Category: peace by piece
Piece 46: A Seat at the Table
In recent years, amid unrest and uprisings to draw attention to the plight of Black Americans because of systemically racist policies, many folks have built on Chisholm’s sentiment by amending it and stating, “If they won’t give you a seat at the table, build your own.”
Piece 45: Honorific
Whatever our names or honorifics are, those we are given and those we earn, they belong to each of us as individuals. People who wish to interact and engage with us and do not respect us enough to pay us the basic courtesy of referring to us directly using the terms we’ve told them we prefer, have not earned the right to have an audience with us.
Piece 44: Trouble The Water
If I stretch my imagination, I can even see children being welcomed by Jesus as a representation of what I’ve witnessed with my sons: little children will always look for water – for routine, for security, for connection, for life.
Piece 43: Sundown
I cannot articulate a specific moment when I first became aware of green books or sundown towns. Rather, for as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with the awareness that in our nation’s past, there were places and times of day when Black people were unwelcome.
Piece 42: Bad Blood
The bad blood between medical science and Black Americans is deeply rooted in the white supremacy that has shaped this country and its subjugation of Black bodies.
Piece 41: Respectability
Why do you think that the names of Pauli Murray, a gender queer woman, and Claudette Colvin, a teenage mother, are not taught to us alongside the name of Rosa Parks, even though all three were civilly disobedient in the same way?
In what ways might respectability politics have influenced your idea of which Black lives matter and which ones don’t?
Piece 40: One Day, When the Glory Comes
As theologian James Cone states in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”
Piece 39: The Other Side of Freedom
Whatever our religious or personal beliefs, it seems clear that hope is active and that the goal of freedom requires the work of love.
Piece 38: We Don’t Say Their Names Enough
How, in all our culture’s popular representations of Rosies’ contributions to the war effort by taking over men’s jobs back home, have Black women escaped recognition?