Oppenheimer, Black Sabbath, Apartheid in Palestine
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everyone,
No preamble this week for you all; we’re going to jump right into it. here are this week’s highlights as we leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
I feel tension when I travel because I’m keenly aware that I am an American tourist on someone else’s stolen land. My family regularly travels to California, and we often explore the state’s natural beauty. Fortunately, when I go back next year, I now know that this website lists places and businesses I could visit where California’s original inhabitants could benefit from my presence. The site includes farms, art, restaurants, museums, and more. May all of us remember that we can participate in renewal, redemption, and restoration with our travel plans and our purchases.
Sabbath, rest, leisure, and respite are required for human flourishing, and they are rich disciplines in our faith. But places in the United States where Black Americans can comfortably accomplish those things have historically been few and far between. In spite of the individual and institutional resistance to these spaces, Black folks carved out resorts and beaches where we could cast off the trappings of a world downstream of slavery for some moments. The shores of Maryland, Southern California, Martha’s Vineyard, the mountains around Denver, Washington D.C., and Upstate New York were home to melanated havens for decades. As long as there has been injustice, there have been people organizing for God’s light to break through in all kinds of ways. We must commit ourselves to learning just where those lights have shined—and how they did in such dark times—so that our own can glow.
The seeds of our greedy, extractive way of life are bearing fruit as climate change has more and more tangible, discernable effects on our daily reality. This climate media resource guide provides many ways to grab a handhold on reliable and helpful information as the alerts about fires, floods, and systemic failures fill our feeds and timelines. Primers, useful links, reports, and much more from this site can help orient us as the flow of information becomes overwhelming. Bookmark this link and consult it when you’re trying to remember what an atmospheric river is, or talking with someone who says today’s temperatures are just part of normal weather patterns.
Sy’s recommendations:
A recent episode of the Arab Digest podcast gives listeners a clear picture of how Israel’s bureaucracy and civil society function to produce the Apartheid under which Palestinians live. It does so by focusing on the particular problems facing certain Palestinian villages which various arms of Israel’s far-right continuously try to demolish. Host William Law, a long-time journalist in the Middle East, and guest Elishiva Golberg from the New Israel Fund, help us see the larger, oppressive landscape the media often overlooks while focusing on things like Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempt to wrest power away from the nation’s judiciary. The devil of subjugation is always in the details, and this episode provides ample, maddening specifics to help us see the plight of those who live under occupation, right where Jesus did too. Our response to them should be as understanding, loving, empowering, and generous as his was to the oppressed of his day.
Last Friday, singer Tony Bennett passed away at 96. It was only from the subsequent obituaries like this one that I learned of his racial justice activism. After becoming friends with a Black soldier during World War II against the wishes of White officers, he witnessed discrimination against fellow performers like Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. He participated in civil rights work before it became something that could earn a White celebrity social capital, and put himself in real danger. The White woman who drove him to the airport after he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. to Selma, Alabama in 1965, was murdered by white supremacists on her drive home. As I’ve said before, it is worth knowing and remembering stories of people like Bennett for a number of reasons, but particularly when we hear White people excuse the failings or cowardice of others throughout history by deploying the phrase ”man of his time.”
A whole lot of people saw the movie Oppenheimer this past weekend, and I hear it’s excellent in terms of its writing, acting, and visuals. I think, however, it’s important to note that the movie, praised for its nuanced portrayal of morally complex people making difficult ethical choices, had to leave out a significant chunk of the story to achieve sympathy for the main characters. As this Twitter thread notes, the real-life Oppenheimer and the people who worked for him ruined the lives of entire communities of Latine people living in northern New Mexico in ways that created generational poverty lasting until today. Oppenheimer’s people killed livestock, demolished homes, stole land from families who had owned it for centuries, and then endangered the health of and killed many Latine residents and even lab employees by failing to provide PPE and adequate safety measures. A daughter of one of the murdered men, Loyda Martinez, later won a class action suit regarding all this. And since I first read this thread, its author has apparently started a podcast to discus the issue further. The link for that is at the end of the thread.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy