My mother's favorite expression was "the longest day has an end."
I think she often said this silently to herself after another day of
factory work, after another day of working in the garment
industry, after another day of taking care of three children,
after a day of cold water and another night of no heat. Even
when there were the Clifton "good times" she reminded us that
this too would end.
We long for Silent Night in crowded pews, by candlelight.
May we who stay at home now find your Christmas blessing.
Reading was the safest way to travel this year — sometimes to another decade and another brand of violence, sometimes to a different continent or a different galaxy altogether. Below are Sojourners' editors' favorite books of the year. Most of these books came out years ago, but by reading them through the lens of 2020, we found new wisdom, escape, resonance, and hope.
To be a Black woman in America and be relatively conscious, to paraphrase James Baldwin, is to be in a state of constant rage. Sweet holy songs don’t readily come to me. Christmas songs do not come to me. As a Black woman who happens to serve at a church that experienced white rage this past weekend when a group of demonstrators ripped down our Black Lives Matter banner and set it on fire, I am angry. And I’m tired.
Web traffic slumps in mid-December, that’s just the way the internet works. And we — the people who make the internet, or at least, Sojourners’ humble corner of it — never much mind because we assume it means you are busy doing wholesome things like baking cookies, building snowfolk, or calling your elected officials to voice your support for the newest bipartisan COVID-19 relief bill.
While Godmothered and its fairy are far from cinematic perfection, by the time the credits roll, Eleanor and Mackenzie have helped each other step more fully into who they both truly were meant to be. In this way, their relationship — minus the wand, the fairy dust, and any promise of true-love-happily-ever-afterness — more realistically resembles actual godparenting.
President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Rep. Deb Haaland to serve as his interior secretary, according to a person familiar with the matter. Haaland, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico since 2019, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary and the first to oversee the department, whose jurisdiction includes tribal lands.
The public discourse around criminal justice reform largely revolves around releasing nonviolent offenders. But this narrow focus will never be enough to fundamentally alter the incarceration system. The majority of people in prison have been convicted of violent crimes, and they are habitually denied parole. True criminal justice reform is impossible until we include people convicted of violent crimes in the conversation.
When I sat down to watch Netflix’s film adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I was hoping to be uplifted by the Black excellence I was sure to find in a film helmed by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. I was ready to exhale and escape. But while the anticipated excellence exceeded my high expectations, it didn’t take me long to realize that the uplift I’d hoped for would not be found in this story: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a tragedy.
As the sun sets on each Election Day, people turn to exit polls to understand what happened and why. After the 2020 presidential election, exit polls suggested that outgoing President Donald Trump performed better among Hispanic/Latinx voters, earning reactions from pundits and former presidents alike. Some have suggested this is due to splits among Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic Protestants, but polls alone may not tell the full story.