KTF Weekly Newsletter – One Million Experiments, Alito’s Authoritarianism, The Judge Who Made up Crimes
Hi everyone,
We have some very happy news to report to you all! On October 16, our fearless founder Suzie gave birth to a healthy, adorable baby girl! Suzie and the baby are at home and doing quite well. Thanks for your prayers and support, and we all wish the newly expanded Lahoud family all the best.
Also, if you missed it, make sure to check out Jonathan’s piece from this week on our site about what happened to his home during Hurricane Ida, how he thinks about suffering as a Christian, and some thoughts on white people using the existence of suffering to question God. And now, here are our highlights for this week to help us leave colonized faith for the Kingdom of God.
Sy’s recommendations:
It’s Native American Heritage Month in the US, and here is a good post by Kaitlin Curtice with a solid starter set of practices to get us thinking beyond a single month of celebrating indigenous people. Curtice is a Potawatomi Christian who is definitely worth following if you don’t already. Her blog is on Substack like our site, so it will be exceptionally easy to sign up for her writing and support her if you want to. Her piece also links to this good CBC article quoting several indigenous leaders in Canada about how the practice of land acknowledgements can be quite hollow. Land acknowledgements have become commonplace in Canada, like corporate statements about Black Lives Matter in the US. Both of these articles remind us to put actions behind words — to be prepared to be active and sacrificial when we make statements about God’s justice and peace.
I’ve written before in this newsletter about how we should listen to prison abolitionists speaking for themselves and evaluate their words, instead of making judgments based on the often inaccurate and sensational coverage of them in the media. Well, there is a great new way to do that. One Million Experiments launched in October, and the creators describe it as a podcast “showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons” through interviews with people doing the work across the country. The first episode features Mariame Kaba, one of the show’s creators who has been doing abolitionist organizing for decades (the movement didn’t spring into being last summer, as many seem to believe). I think this is a good show to follow and use as an opportunity to learn and probably sit in some discomfort for a while for the sake of trying to understand people working as best they can to radically decrease suffering.
Samuel Alito is my least favorite Supreme Court justice. He has been for some time. It’s not because of anything he believes about the law (though I don’t love that either). It’s because he has always struck me as the most authoritarian and most likely to become toxically partisan on a court that does a significantly better job of avoiding partisanship than the rest of the government. Adam Serwer is one of my favorite journalists because he is smart, incisive, thorough, and an exceptional writer. Like many court watchers, Serwer has been criticizing the court’s increased use of emergency orders, which require minimal briefing and no oral argument, to affect right wing legal changes with less oversight from the public. Justice Alito attempted to argue during a speech at a law school that no such thing was happening, and that journalists raising this issue were undermining the court’s authority. Serwer came back with this brilliant and at times quite funny piece laying out in great detail the mess we are in if the court continues on its current, increasingly Trump-esque trajectory of attacking the media.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
A recent ProPublica article details how Black children were jailed for crimes that quite literally do not exist in Rutherford County Tennessee for two generations. Judge Donna Scott Davenport and the other adults involved in this extremely short and straight school-to-prison pipeline have not been held accountable for the trauma they caused. And to this day, Judge Davenport holds her elected seat in a majority white county that incarcerates Black children at alarming rates for non-crimes. For followers of Jesus, Scripture says pray for our leaders and resist systems of oppression. Here is a clear example of what happens when few people are aware or engaged with leaders in power, and thus cannot illuminate or resist what is happening to marginalized groups. ProPublica cast a powerful light and Jesus-followers need to look, learn, pray, and act in our own contexts.
The lineage of Jesus communicates his humanity in a way that ties our savior to a people and a place. Who and where we are from is important to God. And for those whose land and family were stripped away through colonization, the trauma and damage of that separation can persist for generations. This is especially true for indigenous peoples in their fights against broken treaties, protection of sacred lands, and in one famous case, the return of human remains to their proper burial grounds. Denise Chow reports for NBC News that Ernie LaPointe, Sitting Bull’s great-grandson, now has more evidence for his legal fight to move the great leader’s remains to land LaPointe’s family considers more culturally appropriate. It took scientists 14 years to develop techniques to analyze what little of Sitting Bull’s DNA remains, all while no one seriously challenged LaPointe’s familial claims. This drives home the point that known family histories of Native peoples and traditional tribal understandings of ancestry should have just as much authority and credibility as that of the descendants of settler colonialists.
Tim Wise is an anti-racist educator and author of nine books. His latest essay, “Of Dave Chappelle, Comedy, and Tomahawk Chops” is a gift. I’ve thought a lot about Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, which puts a laser focus on the Trans community. Or rather, the focus is Chappelle’s defense against accusations of Transphobia. Wise writes, “When Dave Chappelle talks about race, he’s as funny as any comic who ever lived and as intelligent as any academic. When he talks about gender identity, it’s like he doesn’t know how to use Google.” And it is this observation that is worth deep reflection. Proverbs 3 invites us to trust God and warns us not to be wise in our own eyes. I am unsure of Chappelle’s faith, but I am inclined to believe, like Wise, that being prideful and defensive in the face of wide-ranging criticism from a marginalized group is rarely fruitful.
Thanks so much for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
The KTF team