In Support of Dr. Larycia Hawkins
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Illinois was founded by abolitionists in 1860. Over 150 years have passed since that time, and Wheaton is again faced with taking sides in a controversy. This time it is not the question of the enslavement of blacks, it is the question of academic freedom for a black professor, Dr. Larycia Hawkins, who in 2013 became the first black female tenured professor at Wheaton. She has taken a stance on a question of theology — do Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God?”
The institution is no stranger to controversy. As the world changes outside of its hallowed halls, Wheaton has had to grapple with the subject of evolution, and with LBGT students and alumni. They have gone to court to block student access to birth control and emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act.
I have no interest today in debating the merits of religious institutions, nor will I trash evangelical Christians, who, like Rev. Dr. William Barber, practice what Jesus preached. Though not a theologian, by any means, I do teach comparative religion as a part of course work in cultural anthropology. I stand in solidarity today, with the stance taken by Dr. Larysia Hawkins, against the outpouring of right-wing hate leveled at Muslim Americans. Hate promoted by people like Franklin Graham — son of Wheaton's most famous graduate Dr. Billy Graham.
By now, most people paying attention to the news, have seen photos of Dr. Hawkins wearing hijab, which she donned in solidarity with her Muslim brothers and sisters. Some of you may have visited her facebook page where she posted:
I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American.
I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity.
I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind--a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa that I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014.
I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.
But as I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all. Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity.
As part of my Advent Worship, I will wear the hijab to work at Wheaton College, to play in Chi-town, in the airport and on the airplane to my home state that initiated one of the first anti-Sharia laws (read: unconstitutional and Islamophobic), and at church.
I invite all women into the narrative that is embodied, hijab-wearing solidarity with our Muslim sisters--for whatever reason. A large scale movement of Women in Solidarity with Hijabs is my Christmas #wish this year.
Since that time, Wheaton is seeking to terminate Dr. Hawkins tenure.
A major press conference and rally was held in support of Dr. Hawkins, organized by Arise Chicago, a faith/labor organization.
Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders, students, alumni and colleagues of Hawkins spoke movingly and forcefully.
Students on the Wheaton campus are standing in solidarity with Dr. Hawkins.
Dr. Hawkins stated clearly and fiercely:
Wheaton College cannot hold me to a different standard, a higher standard, than they hold every other employee to.
Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed, are all my sisters and brothers.
Wheaton College cannot intimidate me into cowering in fear of the enemy of the month as defined by real estate moguls, Senators from Texas, Christians from this country, bigots, and fundamentalists of all stripes.
To that I say “Amen.”
Although there's still no premiere date for “The Get Down," an electric new trailer gives us a sense that the upcoming Netflix series packs a serious emotional punch.
The series focuses on a group of South Bronx teens in the 1970s who fall under the tutelage of Grandmaster Flash as what becomes hip-hop takes shape. The first trailer, which you can see above, features stunning music and dance sequences interspersed with striking images of gun violence and buildings burning—reminiscent of the turmoil affecting New York at the dawn of the Reagan era. Its emotional intensity and color-saturated visuals are a signature of series director Baz Luhrmann ("Romeo + Juliet," "Moulin Rouge!").
How a toxic blend of identity politics and cheap oil hurts Nigeria’s states. The Economist: A house divided.
NIGERIA’S 37 governors cannot have expected cheers when they declared late in 2015 that they could no longer pay a minimum wage of just $3 per day to their employees. Politicians are seldom brave enough to cut civil servants’ pay but Nigeria’s governors are desperate.
Low oil prices have slashed government revenues. Nigeria, which nowadays is comprised of 36 states and Abuja, the capital territory, operates as a federation in which most decisions over spending take place in the various state capitals. Every month the central government collects money from oil sales (which still account for more than 50% of its total revenues) and hands over just under half to the states. But that sum has plummeted since the price of crude declined. BudgIT, a Lagos-based analysis group, reckons that the states got a bit less than $7 billion between January and September 2015 compared with almost $14 billion over the same period in 2013. That led to a crisis in June when, having not paid their workers for months, 27 state governments begged President Muhammadu Buhari for a bail-out.
By December 2015 several states were again failing to pay civil servants on time, provoking strikes. Although the fiscal crisis came to a head when the oil price collapsed, its origins are much older.
At independence in 1960 the country was made up of just three regions. Since then it has been divided and subdivided. There are perhaps 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. The big ones all want states where they are in a majority, so they can divvy up oil money and government jobs among their kin. “Some states were created by military leaders just to look after friends and businesses partners,” says Adigun Agbaje, a professor at the University of Ibadan.
This balkanisation of Nigeria has spawned a poisonous kind of politics. At the ballot box, religion and ethnicity matter far more than a candidate’s ideas. Politicians often win votes by stirring up animosity against the ethnic group next door. This can turn violent. More than 8,000 people were killed in ethnic or religious clashes in 2015.
Evangelical Americans believed adoption could save children in the developing world from poverty—and save their souls. The New Republic: The Trouble With the Christian Adoption Movement.
In 2009 a Tennessee couple made a life-changing decision. As devout Christians, they decided to open their home to an orphaned girl from Ethiopia, whom they were told had been abandoned. They knew enough from fellow adoptive parents to expect that the process would be long and hard, but as they were waiting for their application to go through, something unexpected happened. A number of Ethiopian staff at their adoption agency were arrested for transporting children to a different region of the country where they could claim the children had been abandoned. (Following a glut of adoption cases where children were said to have been abandoned in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the court had temporarily stopped processing “abandonment adoptions” of children from the city, but were still allowing cases from elsewhere in the country.)
The stories about where the children came from—whether they were abandoned orphans whose parents were unknown, or their parents were poor and had willingly given them up—seemed to change from day to day. Concerned, but by now committed to the child they’d come to think of as their future daughter, the Tennessee family went ahead with the adoption. But, as I wrote in my book The Child Catchers, after they brought the girl back to the United States and she learned enough English to say so, she told them she had another mother. When they called the agency to demand an explanation, the child’s claim was confirmed: their newly adopted daughter was not an orphan.
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The same year, when Haiti was rocked by a devastating 7.0-level earthquake, the Christian adoption movement became a full-blown cause. The movement threw its weight behind efforts to expedite U.S. visas for unaccompanied Haitian children, so they could leave their country and enter waiting U.S. homes. So many prospective adoptive families inquired about Haitian “earthquake orphans” that Bethany Christian Services began diverting applicants to other countries like Ethiopia, which were then undergoing “adoption booms,” thanks to a combination of poverty and lax laws. (The crisis and subsequent response also gave birth to the most notable scandal in the young Christian adoption movement, when a group of Idaho Baptists traveled to Haiti to gather “orphans” off the streets, with the intention of bringing them to an as-yet-unbuilt adoption center in the Dominican Republic. None of the children, it would turn out, were orphans.)
As a paralyzing political crisis pushed Haiti into an uncertain phase a year ago this month, a stoic President Michel Martelly assured the Haitian people and the international community that he had no interest in governing without the checks and balances of a parliament. Miami Herald: Martelly’s one-man rule comes to an end in Haiti.
“The only decree that I would take is one to organize elections,” Martelly said on the fifth anniversary of the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake as the terms of the entire lower house and a second tier of the 30-member Senate expired because of overdue legislative elections.
Now as Haiti prepares to mark another quake anniversary, it is also preparing to welcome back a functioning Senate and lower house after 14 new Senators and 92 Deputies were elected in the much-criticized Aug. 9 and Oct. 25 elections.
While in theory Martelly’s one-man rule should be curbed, observers and critics say much will depend on the configuration of each of the chambers where no one political party enjoys a majority.
“The question is will the elected parliamentarians take their responsibility and pass laws, ratify accords and people who were put in posts, and put in place institutions that they are supposed to?” said Jocelerme Privert, one of only 10 senators left when parliament dissolved, who is today running to head the Senate. “The fact that parliament was dysfunctional created a void that allowed the executive and the government to take actions outside of the constitution.”
“The constitution doesn’t give the president the power to take decrees. Every decree President Martelly has taken is illegal,” he added.
As promised, Martelly did issue an executive order on elections. But he also issued seven other law-binding orders including a controversial boundary change that triggered weeks of violent protests and street blockades north of the capital, where his beach house and other ritzy private beachfront homes are located.
In addition to the decrees, he also made more than 60 administrative orders. Some were in his powers as president, such as declaring national holidays for the celebration of carnival, while other controversial ones took care of family and friends, or named ambassadors, without the required parliament vetting.
Black theater community deals with issues of diversity and inclusion in the wake of actress Tonya Pinkins’s departure from Mother Courage. Ebony: [On the "A" w/Souleo] Black Theater Wrestles with Representation.
Woodie King Jr., producing director of New Federal Theatre, was immediately concerned after Tonya Pinkins publicly challenged a Classic Stage Company production of Mother Courage and Her Children in which she was to play the title character. The Tony-winning actress cited issues with the production’s representation of people of color.
“I hope and pray artistic directors of major theaters will really hear what is going on and not blame Tonya Pinkins, ’cause she was absolutely right to be concerned about the work she is doing,” said King, who directed Pinkins in 2014 in The Fabulous Miss Marie. “I hope she is not blackballed. It is a concern, because White people see African Americans as just good or bad. There are no gray areas.”
Pinkins surprised many in the theater community when she quit the production and released a statement where she wrote, “It was not relayed to me until the final tech rehearsal that the vision for this Mother Courage (the Black Mother Courage in an African war) was of a delusional woman trying to do the impossible. She would not be an icon of feminine tenacity and strength, nor of a Black female's fearless capabilities. Why must the Black Mother Courage be delusional?”
Pinkins’s decision follows a similar episode in April 2015, when several cast members in Los Angeles departed the play Ferguson, about the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer. In an L.A. Times article, those actors also expressed concerns about the script’s depiction of a central Black character and intentions of the playwright.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Just this last September, the first detection of Gravitational Waves was reported in the respected journal, Nature. If correct, the discovery would affirm an important aspect of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Einstein proposed that massive objects curve the fabric of space time, in a manner often compared to a heavy object bending a flexible surface. This would alter the movements of other objects, and of light, that passed close to the large object. He also suggested that the acceleration of sufficiently heavy objects would cause ripples in space time to propagate outwards.
A massive star is said to have the sufficient density and weight to ripple space time. Researchers reported more readings just two days ago. Coincidentally, around the same time as when David Bowie died.
1.
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure
That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?
Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired
And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
2.
He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours
Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.
3.
Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.
I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions
When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.
-- Tracy K. Smith "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?"
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