Razor Wire in the Rio Grande, the Lacks Family Settlement, the Town that Never Votes
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hey everyone!
Remember, you will be entered into a drawing for a free digital ticket to the Evolving Faith conference if you sign up as a KTF annual subscriber, or upgrade to a founding member subscription, between now and Labor Day. You’ll support what we do centering and elevating marginalized voices in the Church, get access to all our writing and bonus podcasts, and you might win a free digital ticket to an incredible weekend! So subscribe today!
And now, to this week’s highlights!
Jonathan’s recommendations:
After last week’s episode of Shake the Dust, I got a question from a listener about why White people need to leave whiteness but others don’t need to “leave” their race. I think it’s helpful for all of us to understand, remember, and from time to time reflect on the profoundly unjust reality that the races we’ve all been assigned and the associated hierarchies are completely made up. They are fabrications of the people who declared themselves White in order to maintain dominance over everyone else. So White people need to renounce whiteness, and we need to uplift and affirm everyone else. This article by Professor Nell Irvin Painter, a leading expert on how whiteness came to be, gives us a taste of the complicated history. Whiteness is a Enlightenment creation about which there is nothing enlightened. Let’s be clear: White people will be in Heaven, but whiteness will die with the Devil.
White Trash Revelry by Adeem the Artist is a country album (yes, I’m a country fan) that captures the complexity behind what we often think of as the monolith of the genre. I discovered their work while listening to this interview on the polarizing politics of country music. We highlighted this article last week about Country Music’s culture wars, and this album and artist push us beyond the simple narratives about the genre’s race, class, and gender politics that are restrictive and incomplete. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Books and Records” which articulates the strident poverty of east Tennessee through the grief of someone selling their most prized possessions to make ends meet. Adeem themself is a powerful and increasingly popular non-binary singer in a genre often hellbent on resisting nuance and enforcing norms. Following Jesus involves telling the truth about ourselves and others, and Adeem’s truth is worth listening to.
Last week, the family of Henrietta Lacks reached a settlement with a biotech firm that, like so many other individuals and companies, unjustly profited from the stem cells taken from Lacks’ body in a hospital in the 1950’s without her knowledge. For those unfamiliar with the story, Lacks was a Black woman cancer patient whose harvested cells formed the basis of research leading to many extremely profitable medical breakthroughs, and they are still used to this day. But until last week, neither she nor her family were ever compensated. The family’s lawyers are now setting their sights on lawsuits against other companies. Sadly, the medical exploitation of Black bodies in America goes far beyond Henrietta Lacks. Infamously, the federal government watched 399 Black men slowly die of syphilis to study how the disease progressed while telling the men they were receiving treatment in the Tuskegee Experiments. For decades, grave robbers made an industry of digging up Black bodies to supply medical schools in places like New York and Virginia with cadavers. And scientists tested the effects of the toxins in Agent Orange on Black inmates in Philadelphia. Hopefully the settlement for the Lacks Family is the trickle that will become justice rolling down like a mighty river.
Sy’s recommendations:
In a recent newsletter, Jonathan wrote about the razor wire traps Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star set in the Rio Grande for migrants attempting to cross the border. Abbott has not budged on this atrocity despite public outcry, and now, on top of the many already injured, one adult and one child have died. As this newsletter from Esquire contends, what Abbott is doing is arguably an international crime, but also par for the course. The author reminds us of the history of Mexican immigrants fleeing violence in the early 20th century, only to be met with more violence and lynchings on the border perpetrated by mobs and the Texas Rangers. I pray that God’s people in Texas would speak out boldly and clearly against the fear and sheer racist hatred it takes to behave this way toward the strangers God wants us to welcome.
According to the most recent indictment of Donald Trump, in January 2021, We were apparently a whole lot closer than we thought to the Whitehouse attempting to use military force to overturn the election. This article outlines the indictment’s allegations regarding a five-step plan to cast doubt on the electoral result and then enforce martial law to stop inauguration. We saw some of the attempted steps play out in public, like Trump’s bullying state officials about not certifying election results.
Speaking of electoral illegalities, this article highlights Alabama’s continued pattern of suppressing Black votes with two fairly shocking examples. First, the state legislature has outright defied an order from the Supreme Court that it had to redraw its congressional map to make at least two of its seven districts majority Black. The new map includes only one such district, just like it did before the court order. Second, the article tells the story of a small, 85%-Black town that has not held an election for mayor in 60 years. Why? Because in the 1960’s, facing the prospect of Black people having the legal right to vote for the first time, the town’s leaders decided that having no election at all would be preferable. White men have just handed the office down to each other for the past several decades. Technically, the town should now have a new mayor because a Black firefighter filed the necessary paperwork to run in 2020, and nobody else ran. But there was no election, and the existing illegal government has locked him out of power—like literally locked the doors to the rooms where government proceedings happen so he can’t get in. The point of this and my preceding recommendation are simply that too many people underestimate the chances for true evil or corruption to occur in America’s halls of power at all levels. But Christians should follow the example of Jesus’ extreme skepticism and often-blistering criticism of those who wield earthly power. We should be ready to resist when these injustices occur, instead of reeling from the discovery that they can.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy