KTF Weekly Newsletter: Hurricane Ida, the Afghanistan Papers, This Land
September 2, 2021
Hi everyone,
We are a little late getting you this today because Sy and Jonathan are in New York City, where devastating floods caused by the rain from Hurricane Ida have done a lot of damage and the death toll is rising among communities living in known dangerous flood zones which city authorities have largely ignored. All but one of the victims so far lived in poorly-built, basement apartments, where many of the most vulnerable live in NYC.
Jonathan has fairly significant flooding in his basement, so this will be an off-week for him. Sy managed to escape with several roof leaks, but nothing disastrous. Please do pray, and if you want to give to victims of the flooding, one possible place is World Vision’s US Disaster Relief which was already working in the Mississippi Delta after Ida struck, and they will work in the Northeast as well.
Thanks for bearing with us, and here are this week’s resources for leaving colonized faith for the Kingdom of God.
Suzie’s recommendations:
This 2019 Washington Post article on the Afghanistan Papers- a dossier of over 2,000 pages’ worth of interviews and memos- is worth revisiting as it reveals the duplicitous inner workings of empire and topples the idolatrous glorification of US government and military officials. In other words, for those still asking, “What went wrong in Afghanistan?” this piece presents an important part of the answer. Having said that, the article, in many ways, fails to fully confront the logic of American exceptionalism that has proven so destructive in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. This is evident, for example, in how it portrays the true travesty of the war as the idea that the American people were lied to and misled by their own government while glossing over facts like the 43,074 Afghan civilian casualties recorded at the time the article was published. Thus, it is important to not only be aware of this information, but to assess the ways that it is interpreted.
In our Shake the Dust episode on “Reimagining Foster Care,” Sy provided gut-wrenching insight into the child welfare system in the United States and its legacy of violence against low-income, and particularly Black and indigenous families. While children continue to be tragically and unjustly separated from their families every day, this recent article offers a glimpse of part of what that reimagining could look like. It features a housing complex built on the Lummi Reservation in Washington called Sche’lang’en Village. The primary purpose of the site is to reunify indigenous families who have been torn apart by the foster care system. The piece beautifully highlights the possibilities that exist when we view parents with compassion, actually meet the needs of vulnerable families, and offer community rather than separation as part of the solution.
Sy’s recommendations:
In 2019, the Supreme Court heard an appeal of a seemingly ordinary criminal case: a murder that took place in Oklahoma. The defendant was sentenced to death, but an enterprising appellate attorney argued that Oklahoma didn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute the man because he committed the murder on a Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation. The Creek government has no death penalty, so the case became about both saving a man’s life and settling the extremely old and important question of whether about 40% of Oklahoma is, in fact, a reservation. You can learn a whole lot about this case, tribal government within the US, and Indian law in season one of the documentary podcast series from Crooked Media called This Land. Season two is about the current attempt by political conservatives to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act. I haven’t listened yet, but many have tried to get rid of this law in the name of color blindness before, ignoring the country’s horrible history of taking indigenous children away from their families and giving them to white people or placing them in boarding schools. It’s definitely worth a listen, and you will learn a lot about often-ignored areas of law and history.
During the pandemic, the media has both participated in and attempted to hide the heightened devaluation of disabled people’s lives occurring across the globe. Imani Barbarin, disability rights activist and communications specialist, wrote an article this week in Refinery 29 about the many implicitly ableist ideas we have heard from the media, like “healthy people should be fine,” or “COVID primarily affects the elderly.” She thoroughly examines these notions, connects them to larger ableist trends in society, and also discusses the COVID stories we want to avoid; like how many more disabled people we now have in the world. Barbarin is also a great Twitter follow if you’re on the bird app.
Shake the Dust preview
This week, Sy and Jonathan discuss the importance of practicing emotional health for individuals and communities engaged in the work of justice and liberation. They talk about how burying emotions can perpetuate systems of oppression, how emotionally healthy communities confront injustice, how to engage your feelings when dealing with people who disagree with you on fundamental subjects, and a whole lot more.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
The KTF Team