Jaahnavi Kandula, Racist Rock and Roll, The Exxon Con
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hey everyone!
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Second, we’ll be recording our season finale mailbag episode in a couple weeks, and we want your questions! Send us email or voicemail questions to shakethedust@ktfpress.com about anything you’ve heard on the podcast, read in this newsletter, or just thought in your own brain on church, politics, and leaving colonized faith!
And now, to this week’s highlights!
Jonathan’s recommendations:
Last week, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner said his new book consisting of his greatest interviews with rock musicians only includes white men because women and BIPOC artists just aren’t as articulate about music. In addition to the obvious racism and misogyny, including only white men in his book (unironically entitled The Masters) is quite the oversight. Rock and Roll simply would not exist without Black people and women. Here are 14 people who were essential to its formation. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bo Diddley, and more were crucial to the lyrics, chords, rhythms, and sound of the music that burst onto the American landscape in the mmid-20th century. If we are to leave a colonized mindset, we must do more than renounce ignorant words and actions. We must educate ourselves and refuse to participate in the erasure that White Supremacy and patriarchy require. And in this case, you get to do all that by listening to some really amazing music.
(Trigger Warning for police brutality) Seattle police officer Kevin Dave was driving at 74 MPH in a 25-MPH area without his siren on when he struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old international student from India, as she crossed the street. A recording of the vice president of Officer Dave’s police union revealed an unfathomable degree of apathy toward Kandula’s death, which fueled local protests and international attention on the case. I pray that all of the parties involved in the protest and legal proceedings can demonstrate the true value of her life.
There are two monuments to indigenous women that would be worthy of a pilgrimage to South Dakota or Ontario. A 50-foot statue in South Dakota called “Dignity of Earth and Sky” stands overlooking the Missouri River honoring the women of the Lakota and Dakota nations. And in the Whitefish River First Nation, there is a monument dedicated to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. These sites honor the profound beauty and uniqueness of women made in the image of God alongside the deep suffering caused by those who would desecrate that image. Paul exhorts us in Romans to mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice. These are two places where we can do that.
Sy’s Recommendations:
A lawsuit has unearthed documents from ExxonMobil previously unseen by the public related to the company’s efforts to undermine climate science and political action on climate change. It’s true we already knew energy companies behaved this way for decades, even after knowing the danger their industry posed. What is of note here though is that these documents are from the period after Exxon publicly conceded the danger of climate change and was ostensibly supporting environmental policy measures to combat it. This is one example of how hard it is to get a company to act in society’s interest when its means of making money run counter to those interests. Many hailed Exxon for shifting its stance when the change was in fact a cynical masquerade. Let us be a little more shrewd than that, as Jesus instructed, when it comes to the ways of this world.
We’ve mentioned Christopher Rufo before in this newsletter because he was the architect of the Republican panic over CRT. But he has also become one of the new right’s leading thinkers. This article about his new book explains his basic viewpoint: leftist radicals have quietly overtaken most of America’s civic institutions so effectively that it constitutes a kind of overthrow of the US government. I don’t agree with the article’s author on all points, but he does a great job demonstrating, often using Rufo’s own admissions, that the book’s argument lacks evidence and depends heavily on exaggerating the significance of, say, corporate DEI trainings. We have to be aware of the effect of this rhetoric though on millions of Americans. It is a very small step from believing radicals overthrew the government to believing we have to overthrow the government to take it back. From this view, the January 6 insurrection might have been misguided, but it was heading in the right direction.
Slate’s What Next podcast has a fantastic three-part series on the opioid epidemic in America, and different responses to the ideology of harm reduction. The first episode was a collaboration with This American Life, telling the powerful story of a nurse who has dedicated most of her waking hours to ensuring that people who use drugs simply live another day. The second episode deals largely with the intersection of how innovative service provision will still run up against the reality of systemic racism. And the third is on people really putting into practice the radical idea that unhoused people who use drugs can tell us what they need to get off the street, and then we can provide those things with no strings attached. This is journalist Marry Harris at her best, getting at a really complex conversation with clarity, fairness, and some extremely well-placed questions.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy