Hi all,
Please make sure to click on Jonathan’s link below to see how you can help people in Maui, and join us in praying for them.
Let’s get into this week’s recommendations.
Jonathan’s recommendations
If you want to help in Maui, click here for a Google doc that a group of native Hawaiian activists and community leaders created with a thorough list of prayer requests and places to give money. Devastating wildfires there have left thousands of structures destroyed, almost 100 people dead, and thousands more displaced, unemployed, and unable to meet their basic needs. The reasons behind this disaster are layered and many. This podcast from Vox is a helpful primer. Some struggles are current, like the exit of the sugar industry from the area, which left vast stretches of land vulnerable to fire. Others are historical and date back to the unjust American overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and the exploitation of the land and people that followed. I pray we would all heed Paul’s exhortation to mourn with those who mourn, and Isaiah’s call to learn to do right.
Content warning for police brutality) Four sheriff’s deputies and one police officer, all White, pled guilty this week to charges they tortured two Black men, motivated by racism, for hours during a warrantless home invasion. The details recounted by the men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins, are harrowing and include water boarding, racial insults, and a gunshot wound through Jenkins’ mouth. The officers expected to go unpunished per the history of racial terrorism and police brutality in this former confederate state. Fortunately this time their expectations were wrong. We lament this horror and pray for redemption, justice and renewal. Please especially pray for Jenkins and Parker to receive the psychological and emotional healing necessary to move through the waves of grief, shame, anger, and everything that comes after such an unimaginable ordeal.
Prager U is not an accredited educational institution, but an organization with an intentionally misleading name that creates media to pass off right-wing propaganda as historically accurate information. Last week, Florida schools formerly approved Prager U materials for use in classrooms across the state. After defending a new state history curriculum that attempts to emphasize how slavery was beneficial to enslaved people because of the skills they learned while working for the people who owned them, Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration has doubled down on indoctrinating another generation into the same racist nonsense. These developments are not surprising but that does not make them any less alarming. My prayers are with the young people in Florida and the teachers wrestling with the ways the state is telling them to distort the truth. May God’s justice roll down where it seems injustice is unyielding.
Sy’s recommendations
(content warning for mentions of suicide) One conversation I’ll never forget was when a colleague told me her mother, who had a medical condition that would eventually make her go blind, had said she would kill herself when she fully lost her sight. I obviously felt terrible for the woman and her mother, but also wondered what on earth the point was in telling me that someone had said they would rather be dead than me. So I was fascinated by this article from deaf writer Sara Novick, responding to the statement she has heard often from strangers that they would die or kill themselves if they couldn’t listen to music. Her thoughts about these people’s perspective are insightful, witty, and quite gracious. It also comes with a list of other ignorant questions she gets (like “Can deaf people drive?) and her brief answers (“Yes, with our eyes”).
A pregnant woman in Detroit named Porcha Woodruff was falsely arrested for a carjacking and held in jail for almost 11 hours before being released on bail to a hospital because she was having contractions. She is now one of six people, all Black, known to be falsely arrested because the police department’s facial recognition AI software matched their image with the image of another Black person under investigation. Watch this interview of Woodruff, or read the transcript at the same link, to hear her infuriating story of trying to convince officers of her innocence when they were already certain that powerful, accurate digital analysis had determined her guilt. Woodruff is now suing the police, highlighting what experts call algorithmic bias, or the discrimination that results when people build their own prejudices and ignorance into AI systems.
I’m sure many of you remember the book and movie both called The Blind Side about a Black teen adopted by a kindly White family who turned his life around and helped him realize his talent for football. Criticism about the movie’s stereotypical White savior narrative abounded at the time, but now Oher himself is suing the family for profiting off his story without ever paying him a cent. How did that happen? Well, they never actually adopted him. Instead, they convinced the 17-year-old Oher to sign a conservatorship, giving them total control over his financial life at the time. He says the family has been collecting royalties for over a decade, but cut him out of that deal. Moreover, he says he lost professional opportunities and has faced prejudice for years because of the ways the movie depicted him as unintelligent. This article has all the details. The story is fairly stunning, but also reflects the deeply-ingrained assumptions that many White people have about Black people they view as helpless and directionless without a White guiding hand. Perhaps the family thought Oher should be thankful for the football skills he learned under their exploitation (see Jonathan on Florida’s history curriculum above).
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy