Blogaround

New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem. Image source.

1. How Harry Potter Parallels to the Deaf World (posted March 7) "It is because ever since I read the very first Potter book when I was a little boy, I've always felt like the author J. K. Rowling were inspired by the Deaf community for her Harry Potter and the whole wizardry idea."

2. It's Been 96 Years Since White Mobs Destroyed Tulsa's Black Wall Street (posted May 31) [content note: anti-black violence] Yeah, I remember this was in my history textbook in high school- we learned about it when we studied the civil rights movement, but I didn't really *get* it. I didn't get how much the white people involved HATED black people- as in, hated them so much that they literally didn't want them to live there as full members of society (and that there are still white people today who truly do hold those same explicitly racist, evil beliefs). The term "riot" makes it sound like a crowd kind of got out of control and it's not really anyone's fault, it "just happened" in "the heat of the moment"- but no, it wasn't like that. You don't "get out of control" and then go pilot a plane to drop burning balls of chemicals on the areas of the city where black people lived and worked. That takes concentration. That's something that's done by people who know exactly what they're doing. Must have been that those white people had wanted to destroy black homes and businesses for a long time, and they finally found an opportunity where society would let them get away with it.

And I didn't get how it must have felt for black people to live in fear of violence. (And actually, that's still true today.) How thousands of them fled their homes after the massacre in Tulsa, and had to go rebuild their lives, and there was no justice- nobody in charge did anything to meaningfully address the great injustice they had suffered. Like, society is just okay with it when people do these terrible things to you, and you just have to move on and deal with it without any help, without any justice.

3. White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (3.1) (posted September 19) "Back in 1975, “therapeutic” still meant mostly positive things."

Also: White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (4). An excerpt from an evangelical book published in 1975, arguing "But what about the right of the child to be born despite the evil way in which it was conceived [rape]? In this case the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo."

4. These are the NFL players protesting today amid Trump criticism (posted September 24)

5. The Washington Post and the Kaepernick Controversy: A Tale of Normalizing Toxic Christianity (posted September 25) "Further, the white supremacist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ Christianity embodied by the vast majority of white Evangelicals is incompatible with democracy and downright irredeemable, and we need to say so. Kaepernick’s Christianity does not need anything from Tebow’s."

And a good post from Libby Anne along the same lines: Progressive Piety and Conservative Politics: On Kaepernick, Tebow, and American Christianity.