Archive for August, 2008
You Owe Me Nothing
For the shackles
And the lynchings
And the rapes
For the denials (of my dignity, my contributions, my humanity)
For the denegration
The slurs
The bombings
Water hoses
And dogs
For inequality
And neglect
The blindness (yours and mine)
The affirmative non-action (killing my dignity, my contributions, my intelligence)
The oppression
The suppression
Misrepresentation
Baracades
Injustice
Disengaged
Second-rate (I’m your follower, never your leader, your inspiration, your friend, your family) loser
For revised history
And profiling
And [...]
How Black is Racial Reconciliation?
Tucked tightly in among some dusty books on the overflowing stacks in Stevens Bookstore, I found it: Tom Skinner’s How Black is the Gospel. That was my first brush with the gospel according to Dr. Skinner, New York gangster turned evangelist/prophet.
I have read the book from cover to cover, many times, dissecting it so I [...]
I, Racist
Here’s a little yellow and white book with a shocking title. Selected and arranged by Ella Mazel, it’s been around since 1998 so you might have seen it. Despite the shocking title, it’s not a finger wagging tsking white-folks-bashing book. And it’s not big but it packs some major punch.
From Ms. Mazel’s Web site:
“Most of [...]
A Confession
When Dr. King died, I was sill in diapers. Ford’s new muscle care, the Mustang, was brand new but the civil rights struggle was not.
I imagine that my parents and paternal grandmother, who played a huge role in my early development, tried to keep the turmoil of the times away from me as a toddled [...]
