Magazine
HERE WE LEARN from the ghost of Marvin Gaye, question the ethics of Nikola Tesla, examine the character of God, and drift in lament and wonder.
In these poems by Hanif Abdurraqib, violence appears in different forms. In some lines, it is a fistfight between teenagers in a schoolyard, in others the anti-Blackness of a suburb or the music industry: “[T]he mailman still hands me bills like I should feel lucky to have my name on anything in this town,” Abdurraqib writes.
Thirteen of the 51 poems are titled after a criticism he heard from a white woman at a poetry reading in 2016: “How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?”
OK, I ADMIT IT. I haven’t read Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the most talked about economics book of recent decades. There are too many novels in the world, and economics is hard. But not to worry, even for numerophobes like me, documentary filmmaker Justin Pemberton has come to the rescue with a quick and clever 103-minute movie of the same name that lots of people who claim to have read Piketty’s book say is, if a not a sufficient replacement, at least an effective companion.
Despite the title, the bulk of the film covers the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries: A rotating cast of talking heads (including Piketty’s own) narrate the story of wealth in Europe and North America—from the palace of Versailles (“Royals” by Lorde on the soundtrack) to the slave markets of New Orleans and the happy suburbs of mid-20th century America. All this is illustrated by a montage of clips from movies, includingLes Misérables (the old black-and-white version and the musical), Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, and many more, and Depression-era newsreel footage of striking workers battling police and seizing factories.
By This We Know
The Chicago-based rap duo Verbal Kwest explore the Bible’s commandments of love in their latest release, Lovkwest. On seven tracks, pastor-rappers J.Kwest (Julian DeShazier) and BreevEazie (Anthony Lowery) unleash words of wisdom and passion over intricate beats, speaking of God’s great embrace in a year of immense loss. Verbal Kwest.
The Longitudes
“The history of Christianity is one of cultural appropriation,” Phuc Luu says in his debut Jesus of the East: Reclaiming the Gospel for the Wounded. Drawing on traditions of the Eastern church, Luu dislodges the West’s dominance over much of Christianity, highlighting how the faith doesn’t belong solely to Europeans. Herald Press.
IN THE FIRST season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the show’s main protagonist, Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), arrests a jewel thief named Dustin Whitman (Kid Cudi) without sufficient evidence, and the entire precinct spends the next 48 hours trying to fix his mistake. By showing the police detectives desperately trying to find evidence, Brooklyn Nine-Nine portrays the arrest as a puzzle to be solved instead of an abuse of power.
With likable characters and sharp writing that hits more than it misses, Brooklyn Nine-Nine has cemented itself as both a critic and crowd favorite, earning Emmy nominations and massive support from its networks, NBC and Fox. Its cast is one of the more diverse on television, and so are its characters. The police captain is a gay, Black, married man. Two of the other detectives are Latinx; one of them is a bisexual woman.
But at the end of the day, the show sanitizes police brutality and misconduct with humor. Police incompetence in Brooklyn Nine-Nine is portrayed as funny and showing a need for the character to develop; it doesn’t threaten someone’s safety like it does every day in real life.
WHEN WESTERN THEATER was born in the ancient Theatre of Dionysus some 2,500 years ago, its creators aspired to create a democratic institution, meant to serve the members of every tribe in Greece. The reality fell far short of the aspiration, of course, since women and slaves were excluded from both democracy and the grand stone auditorium. Nevertheless, the theater of Greece was born in a kind of perfect storm, a concurrence of democratic ideology and ideals—especially the belief in free speech for those deemed fit to govern (i.e., free men)—with a golden age of literature. This era brought about some of the most powerful dramatic works known to humanity in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.
We could be at the brink of another golden age for theater, arising from changes caused by the coronavirus pandemic. How can I say this, when most of those who work in the theater are worried about how theatrical institutions will survive this crisis? Joseph Haj, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, notes that theater has endured for centuries “because it is one of society’s proven necessities, not some old-fashioned practice.” It’s a necessity because humans need to gather to hear our stories and find safety in being together—the communal theater experience pushes back at the dangers and sadness that surround us.
And yet the questions abound: Will there be enough funding, public and private, to keep theaters afloat? Will audiences come if they are living in fear? Funding and sufficient audience support were worries before the pandemic hit, even as theatrical writing and technique thrived during the past decade, releasing many new voices onto public stages. The problem is that when a theater ticket often costs upward of $100, few people can afford access to these new voices. Despite the democratic ideals at its roots, U.S. live theater has served a very small, mostly white, upper-middle-class audience. The main exceptions are the rare state and federal grants that provide broader access through educational programs.
“I TEACH MUSIC and theater, so it was a little difficult to teach via an online platform. I started an initiative called ‘Worship Wednesdays,’ and I took over our school’s Instagram Live page. We started with vocal warmups and a song where the kids could move around—I choreographed the dances myself. Then I went through another two or three songs. We set it up so kids can request to appear on the screen with you, so I’d have some of them come and sing that way.
What I noticed is that students were seeking engagement with each other. The Instagram Live thing was cool because they got to interact. They couldn’t see each other’s faces but they could engage in a chat. Growing up is all about interacting with your peers, and so they had been missing out on that opportunity.
HOW CAN SOMEONE born white take on new flesh when they are old?
This is the question I hear when I read the story of Nicodemus during this Black Lives Matter moment amid the 400-year-long freedom struggle of Black people in the U.S. “How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:4). How?
In 1707, my sixth great-grandfather bought my sixth great-grandmother at a slave auction at a French military post in what is now Mobile, Ala. She, later “christened” Thérèse, was a 10-year-old Chitimacha girl. He, Jacques Guedon, was a 17-year-old from Nantes in Brittany who had been recruited into the French colonial navy.
The Chitimacha were the most powerful nation along the Gulf Coast. Prior to contact with Europeans, the Chitimacha lived in a sophisticated matrilineal culture of classes and clans that served them for more than 10,000 years—through disease, war, and climate changes. They vigorously and continually defended their homeland against incursions and slave raids by English, Spanish, and French military, migrants, and missionaries. Today, they are the only tribe in Louisiana to still occupy a portion of their aboriginal homeland.
But a young French-Canadian commander named Bienville was tasked with establishing a fort at Mobile and defending it against the English. He needed to make alliances with native nations—primarily the Chickasaw and Choctaw—or severely weaken those that refused. To accomplish these twin goals and build up his personal wealth by selling Indian slaves, Bienville led his regiment in a night raid on Thérèse’s village. Likely all the adults were massacred. The dozen or so children left alive, including Thérèse, were rounded up for sale. It was a minor skirmish in France’s half-hearted attempt to establish and maintain extractive trade routes for maximum profit and minimum outlay, an expedient conquest to boost political standing and pay off debts.
THE DARKEST HOUR, as they say, comes one sliver of a moment before dawn. We have been experiencing our nation’s darkest “day” since well before the moment the Confederacy fired its first shot at Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C. That cannonball tore time in two, each successive battle of the Civil War ripping the sky farther and farther apart. After the war we saw stars, possibilities—the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments to come.
Between May 28 and June 1 of this year, flames rose from numerous U.S. cities. One fire leveled a cinder-block structure that housed bathrooms and a maintenance office near the White House grounds. In the darkness we were forced to confront our hearts when tears filled our eyes as we watched a Starbucks burn, in the shadow of our numbed response when we first learned of George Floyd’s death—another Black person dead. Yes, property damage is mournful. The destruction is a crime because of the impact the losses have on people. But no, this kind of property damage is not “violent,” not in the manner of violence against people, which defaces the image of God, or against anything that holds the breath of God. Buildings are made by people, not by God. Nor do brick and mortar hold the breath of God. They do not feel. They do not have a family. Things can be replaced. Life cannot.
THERE IS A nationwide trend of Republican state lawmakers rethinking the death penalty, and their faith is playing a central role. From Catholics to evangelicals, Christian lawmakers on the Right are abandoning capital punishment like never before.
Take Colorado as an example. For years a bill to repeal the death penalty ran into a wall in the state Senate. This year three Republican senators co-sponsored the bill and provided the crucial votes for it to pass. The Colorado House of Representatives approved it and the governor signed it into law in March—making Colorado the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty.
Why did they do it? These Republican lawmakers decided the death penalty does not align with their Christian or conservative values: the sanctity of human life, individual liberty, and limited government. They see a system that exonerates one person on death row for every nine it executes, with more than 160 people in the U.S. being freed from death row due to wrongful convictions since 1973. They see a bloated government program that does nothing to make people safer.
“We were created in the image of God and that is a very good thing. And part of what that means, in my understanding, is it is against the natural order for one created in the image of God to willfully take the life of another created in the image of God,” said state Sen. Owen Hill. “My conscience demands that I vote to abolish the death penalty in Colorado.”
IN JUNE, NEARLY 700,000 DACA recipients could breathe a sigh of relief when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The court determined that the basis for President Trump’s action was “arbitrary and capricious.” The grounds presented for termination failed to consider the impact of the program’s rescission, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.
The grounds of the ruling are important because the court did not address whether DACA was legal. For now, DACA remains fragile. People who have benefited from the program, put in place by executive action under President Barack Obama in 2012, can continue to obtain valid work permits and are protected from deportation. An estimated 130,000 people would have been eligible to submit new applications for the program, except that the Trump administration released a memo on July 28 saying it would “reject all initial requests for DACA and associated applications for Employment Authorization Documents.”
This momentary reprieve and upsurge of hope resulted from decades of fierce social, political, and legal organizing by undocumented youth and their supporters, often at great personal risk. The Trump administration may decide to attack DACA again. It would likely be a costly undertaking since a substantial bipartisan majority of Americans support DACA.
While DACA prevents the eviction from the U.S. of a sector of immigrants, it does not dismantle the massive deportation machine that operates in this country nor create a pathway to citizenship—key components of comprehensive immigration reform. Authentic immigration reform begins with the recognition that U.S. immigration laws, from their inception, have been informed by discriminatory narratives. The first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, made it possible for those born elsewhere to become citizens—but only if they were “free white persons” (“white” meaning certain Europeans, and “persons” essentially meaning men), excluding enslaved people, Native Americans, those without property, most women, and all others not defined as white. Only property-owning white male citizens could vote.
IT IS TIME for radical change. This summer Black students in Oakland, Calif., demonstrated they deserve it—schools without police. After a 10-year organizing effort, students of the Black Organizing Project were victorious. The Oakland school board voted unanimously to pass the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department,” which will dismantle the school police department and redirect $2.5 million to pupils’ needs. Like students across the country, Oakland scholars want to reimagine safety because too many of them have been dehumanized, disrespected, and criminalized by police in their schools.
Following the brutal murder of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May, the United States has seen a surge in progress in the movement for police-free schools. While this demand is not new, the moment made it real.
The Minneapolis school board led the way when it unanimously voted to end its contract with the police department. Then Portland. Then Denver. Then Charlottesville, Rochester, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.
Fueled by Black and brown students, the police-free schools movement asserts that removing police from schools will increase students’ chance to thrive and feel safe from state violence. The presence of police in schools increases the chances of youth interaction with the criminal legal system. Whether we call them “school resource officers” or police, they enforce the criminal code. Moreover, police too often aggressively suppress what they perceive to be disobedience or disorder. They ticket, arrest, and violently impose their will upon young people.
VOTER SUPPRESSION IS real, and voter fraud is an exaggerated myth. America should be alarmed about these basic truths, because the reality of voter suppression and the dangerous lie of voter fraud represent a real threat to the legitimacy of the November election and the health of our democracy, which was sick long before the devastating arrival of COVID-19.
In June, Georgia’s primary exposed glaring problems and injustices that do not bode well for the November general election. People in Atlanta—particularly the parts that are predominantly African American—experienced onerous waiting times due to failures with new voting machines, ill-equipped poll workers, and the secretary of state’s failure of leadership. This followed the debacle in Wisconsin, where the Republican-controlled legislature insisted on an in-person primary at the height of the pandemic, forcing people to choose between their health and their right to vote.
The U.S. prides itself as being a beacon of democracy, and yet instead of making it easy for every eligible citizen to vote, some elected officials are erecting barriers to make voting more difficult, which they try to justify with spurious claims of voter fraud. For example, in April President Trump admitted why he and many Republicans oppose the expansion of voting by mail, saying that “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” In other words, according to Trump, making it easier for people to vote, even amid a pandemic, disadvantages Republicans.
IF THE MAJORITY ruled, Stacey Abrams would be governor of Georgia. Abrams officially lost the 2018 gubernatorial race by fewer than 55,000 votes—after her opponent, Georgia secretary of state (and now governor) Brian Kemp, improperly purged more than 340,000 voters from the state’s rolls. Lawsuits also charged Kemp, who oversaw his own election, with disallowing the registrations of 50,000 Georgians—less than 10 percent of whom were white—due to minor discrepancies in the spelling of their names.
“WHITE CHRISTIANITY IN America was born in heresy.”
This statement was made by Yale University theologian Eboni Marshall Turman last year before a large gathering of religion scholars. Marshall Turman, a formidable leader in African American theology, did not explain her meaning. In that room, she did not need to do so.
But as I heard her, I thought dolefully about how very long it took me as a white American Christian ethicist to be ready to engage or even to understand such a statement. I wondered doubtfully how many white American Christians today would be prepared to discuss it rationally. After all, part of what is so deeply wrong with white evangelicalism has to do with race. If what comes “after evangelicalism” does not address our racism at its roots, we shouldn’t bother.
To say that white Christianity in America was born in heresy is to make a theological statement about racism prior to any moral evaluation. It is to suggest that our local racism problem is ultimately rooted in heresy, a violation of central tenets of Christian doctrine. It is also to say that this heresy was present from the birth of American Christianity. There was no original innocence—the heresy and its resulting sins were there from the beginning.
This begs the question of whether the ultimate historical source of such heresy can be identified. It seems to me that a compelling starting point is 15th century Europe as it began conquering and colonizing the world in the name of Christ. The story begins with those first imperial powers, Spain and Portugal, but soon after extends to Britain and other European colonial nations, including Holland, France, Belgium, and so on. These were empire-building nations on the cusp of their grand adventures. They confidently believed themselves to be the center of the world, superior to all other cultures, entitled to conquer and colonize, and in doing so actively advancing God’s will. The European powers believed this for many centuries. Some would say that they, and their descendants, believe it still.
EACH SPRING, I plan how to survive the summer. Without the school-year routine, our family leans on relatives, friends, summer camps, and cobbled-together vacation time to get our kids through. But this year, everything stopped: In a pandemic, you can’t visit Grandma or drop off the toddler for a playdate. If raising children takes a village, our village has been scattered. And while the nation collectively experiences this ongoing trauma, parents are attempting to shepherd our children through the same.
A large part of parenting is risk assessment—a constant cost-benefit analysis of how the decisions you make will affect your children for the rest of their lives. When I was pregnant with my third child, now 1, I read Emily Oster’s Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool to alleviate the added anxiety. Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, correctly observes that with constantly changing internet recommendations on everything from breastfeeding to screen time, “there is reassurance in seeing the numbers for yourself.” She lays out the scientific data so parents can make informed decisions; for me, it offered confidence—and a rare sense of control.
But that sense of security goes out the window in a pandemic, unforeseen economic collapse, and necessary reordering of our institutional constants. Parents face new risks with precious little, and everchanging, data to guide our analysis. The most common fear shared by parents I’ve spoken to is that our kids won’t be OK—that in trying to find the balance between naked truthfulness and parental protectionism, we’ll lean too heavily to one side, that the wrong decisions will leave lasting marks that follow them into adulthood.
“I don’t know what the world is going to look like. Will I have the wisdom and the capacity and the ability to help guide her through?” Susi McCrea tells me. When we spoke, McCrea was 32 weeks pregnant and living in northeast Washington, D.C., with her husband, Christopher, who was recently laid off, and 1-year-old daughter Katja.
“Will we be able to help [Katja] build the resilience that she needs for something that’s so full of uncertainty—and maybe just a really uncertain world for quite some time—without instilling a lot of fear?”
I GREW UP in Gulfport, Miss., which is on the coast, and my parents are from Hattiesburg, which is about an hour north up Highway 49. On weekends, my mom and dad would pile the six of us in the car, and we would visit my grandparents.
My grandparents’ names always caused some confusion in our family because my grandmother was Wilter and my grandfather was Walter, but they called each other Bill and Jim. I didn’t know who was who. And my grandmother—Wilter, Bill, and known affectionately by my grandfather as Sugar Honey—she and my grandfather raised us with my parents to understand where we came from.
They wanted us to understand that my great-grandmother Moo Moo, who lived in the little house next to theirs, was two generations removed from slavery. Her grandparents had been slaves. Her parents had been sharecroppers. If you were lucky, you would get there in time to help her shell peas and listen to the stories that she would tell. You could listen to the history from her mouth, and you knew you were in a sacred place sitting on that front porch. When I got ready to run for office, I was bringing them with me, and I didn’t quite understand it.
But in September 2018, as the election for Georgia’s governor was heating up and stories were flying around about voter suppression, I went home to Mississippi because my grandmother was ailing. My grandfather had passed away in 2011, but my grandmother, she was on the edge. Grandma had a rocking chair recliner she sat in most of the day and a bed right beside it. When you came in the room, you sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand—because she was watching MSNBC, and you didn’t want to interrupt her learning why she was mad that day.
When she got to a place where she was going to acknowledge your presence, she would mute the television and turn to you. As I sat by her bedside, her hand was frailer than it had ever been before. The skin was papery and soft. The bones were brittle, and I could feel every one of them; I knew I was holding my grandmother’s hand for one of the last times. But she didn’t want to talk about how she was ailing; she wanted to talk about my election. She asked me if I was taking care of her baby, meaning me. I said, “Grandma, I’m doing my best. But I’m worried, because this man I’m running against is in charge of the election. He’s the scorekeeper, he’s the contestant, he’s doing the box copy, he’s the umpire, and it’s going to be hard.” And she said, “Have you done what you can?” I said, “Yes ma’am.” “Let me tell you about the first time I voted,” she said.
WE’RE CLEARLY NOT yet in a post-pandemic world, and almost everyone seems well-disillusioned of any pretense that we live in a “post-racial” time. But, as Julie Polter explains in her cover essay, the COVID-19 pandemic—and the worldwide protests in response to the other pandemic of police brutality and systematized racism—has led to actions once thought unimaginable. From NASCAR to the Southern Baptist Convention, a surprisingly wide range of people and institutions seem suddenly aware of their own complicity in symbols and structures of injustice—and more and more white people express their recognition that police brutality isn’t, after all, the isolated behavior of a few “bad apples.”
“QUIET MIRACLES,” THAT’S what the late writer Brian Doyle calls them, those moments of wonder so freighted with significance they inscribe themselves upon our hearts. If there is a unifying thread in One Long River of Song, a posthumous collection of Doyle’s essays and prose poetry, it is this: Quiet miracles bespot our lives. They are everywhere, if only we have the patience and humility to see them as such.
Consider a shrew or a hummingbird or a can of anchovies clutched to a young boy’s sleeping chest. That’s what Doyle does. He finds miracle and mystery enough to still your heart, bring you to tears, or leave you smirking and smiling in awe. Revealing and reveling in such wonders is what Doyle does best. And he does it time and time again, in short prose poems and essays that rarely run over two pages long.
CAROLYN FORCHÉ’S FOURTH poetry collection, Blue Hour, appeared in 2003, and her readers have longed for the next ever since. It’s hard to imagine any poetry book worth a wait of 17 years. Forché’s new collection, In the Lateness of the World, is worth more.
As the title suggests, Forché explores a dying world—countries ravaged and erased by war, islands drowned in natural disasters, seas overflowing with garbage. The poems are both haunting and haunted, including the memories of a lost world and the corpses that remain.
Forché coined the term “poetry of witness.” Her witness here is not only characteristically unflinching but also a challenge to readers.
The first half of the book mostly grieves the world’s tragedies at large, but always with the particularity that gives her ghosts a pulse. Nearly every poem includes rapid lists of sharp images. Forché’s lists dizzy and overwhelm, effectively dropping us into warzones and forcing us to follow her through an apocalypse.
IN HER STUNNING second novel, Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers, once again examines race and kinship. This time, she interrogates the color line through the Vignes twins—their coming of age and its impact on the subsequent generation. Born and raised in the fictional town of Mallard, La., the twins dream of escaping their stifling community. At 16, they run away together. In New Orleans, a desperate choice severs their bond: Stella passes as white to get a job, then leaves her sister Desiree in order to marry a white man.
Years later, when Desiree flees an abusive marriage and returns to Mallard with her daughter, Jude, the town is shocked by the child’s color: “black as tar,” “blueblack.” Having inherited her father’s complexion, Jude looks nothing like her mother. From its opening pages, The Vanishing Half grounds us in this “strange” town that, “like any other, was more idea than place.” The idea: a community for those “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” An idea born of a freed slave, the twins’ ancestor, as he “stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him.”