Banning Book Bans, Tina Turner, Haitian Migration
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi all,
Some bad news to start this week. Our founder and co-host Suzie is leaving KTF Press. She’s going to be focusing on her PhD. We are very sad to see her go, and will certainly miss both her and her contributions to everything we do here. This newsletter and our podcast would not be what they are without her, and she was the driving force behind both of our books. We wish her all the best, and we know she will crush that doctorate! You’ll hear more from us on this on Monday in an announcement we’re putting in our podcast feed (which also has exciting news about Shake the Dust season 3).
And now we turn to our highlights as we seek to leave colonized faith for the Kingdom of God.
Jonathan’s Recommendations
The United States functioned as an Apartheid state for about two hundred years, and the education system was no exception. This is a truth we must mark, remember, and resist repeating, and our public memorials are part of that process. Now Colored School No. 4 is an official landmark, set apart in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City to remind us of the progress we have made and the work yet to be done. Erik Washington, an urban planner, works to preserve sites in the city related to Antebellum Black history. He ran a tireless grassroots campaign for this landmark starting in 2018. Though integration was effective, re-segregation is the recent historical trend in US schools, as documented here. The Kingdom of God is just and equitable. We must continue to press in toward that goal!
Racism in soccer is not new, but society’s reckoning with it ebbs and flows in fits and starts. And that reckoning looks different in contexts all over the world. Spanish soccer is struggling to acknowledge its entrenched racial division and hierarchy as one of its biggest stars, the Black, Brazilian-born Vinícius Júnior, endured racist chants from Valencia fans before the referee sent him off with a red card for getting in a fight with an opposing player. The subsequent public dialogue in Spain mirrors our own, as detailed in this great piece from The Athletic. Commentators are resisting reflection, attacking Vinícius as a “provocateur,” minimizing the extent of racism in broader Spanish society, and attempting to move on without making substantive changes. Though the West has abandoned many of our explicitly racist practices and policies, the air in the post-colonial world is still thick with the fumes of white supremacy.
Book bans are accelerating in the United States, centered on movements in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina per this article from The Atlantic. But recently, the Biden administration and some state politicians are pushing back. The Guardian reports that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker will soon sign a law withholding state funding from public schools and libraries that choose to ban books. “In Illinois, we don’t hide from the truth,” said the governor. I wish an honest view of history did not require this much legal force. Yet, The trajectory of our increasingly polarized population makes me deeply grateful for leaders willing to leverage their authority to illuminate the truth.
Sy’s recommendations:
A bit of nepotism from me this week. On Monday, Gabrielle Apollon, my wife who you’ve heard on Shake the Dust before, is moderating an online panel discussion on Haitian migration throughout the western hemisphere. It will focus on the anti-Blackness Haitian migrants have consistently faced as they have moved to new destination countries in the Americas over the last decade or so, and the international solidarity it will take to combat that racism. There will be activists from all over speaking during the event, which is part of the UN’s Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. Sign up for the Zoom webinar here!
As I’m sure most of you know by now, Tina Turner passed away last week. I would really encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to watch Tina, the 2021 HBO documentary about her remarkable life told from her perspective. It details her early career, both the unprecedented success and the horrors of her marriage to Ike Turner. Then there is the incredible story of how she recovered from that period to become something no one had seen before: a middle-aged, Black woman rock star who packed arenas around the world. And after all that, she did one of the more impressive things a celebrity can do; she gave it all up for a happy, quiet life in her later years. You hear a lot of wisdom from her throughout the film, and I promise it’s well worth your time.
American pundits have been panicking about a crisis of organized retail shoplifting in America, arguing for higher penalties for perpetrators. It seems so logical: arrest more shoplifters, punish them harder, crime goes down. Boom! Done. But as this article from The Appeal explains, changes in arrests and sentencing don’t correlate with changes in theft rates, which have barely moved over the last decade. This is partially because the people stealing are the bottom of the organization, often poor, frequently human trafficking victims, and sometimes people feeding drug addiction (another problem we treat unsuccessfully with prison). People selling the stolen goods, however, make a killing on online market places. One might conclude then that curbing the profitability and desirability of retail theft would involve regulating the use of Amazon or Facebook. But no such policy proposals are forthcoming. Instead, we will keep pushing the Sisyphean boulder of individual larceny arrests while debating which welfare program or liberal ideology has produced this wave of theft by decaying the morals of the lower classes. I think it is worth a thorough search for the idols and political incentives that send us down these pathways of thought and stop us from addressing reality.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy