It is right to give God thanks and praise.

Dr. Martin Luther King once lamented, “At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing that Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation.”

Sadly, in many places, his words still ring all too true.

I want to express my gratitude that at 11:00 last Sunday morning, this was not true at the church in my neighborhood.

If you’ve seen my “How Diverse Is Your Neighborhood?” post, you know that metro DC is generally very segregated. But my neck of the woods is one of the few areas that looks almost brown on the big map:

Each dot represents 25 people: Red means white, blue means black, orange represents Hispanics, green means Asian, and grey means other.

Not too bad for DC.

Of course, even in a pretty diverse neighborhood, churches can tend towards the monochromatic. The language spoken, the style of music, the preaching, the ministry leaders and emphases, the art, the way people dress… they can make some people feel more welcome than others.

As I looked around during the homily Sunday morning, though, I realized there’s something different going on here. In the pews immediately surrounding me, I saw eleven Asians, seven black people, twelve white people (I counted myself), and thirteen Latinos. Thank you, Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not claiming we’re done “preach[ing] brotherhood and mak[ing] it a reality within [our] own body.” And Dr. King’s call to “really go out and to transform American society” remains. There’s a long road ahead.

But I thank God that 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing that Christ has no east or west, at least in this one church, we’re beginning to do it together.

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Race: Are We So Different?

From June 18, 2011, through January 1, 2012, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, will be hosting an exhibit called “Race: Are We So Different?”

The exhibition RACE: Are we so different? brings together the everyday experience of living with race, its history as an idea, the role of science in that history, and the findings of contemporary science that are challenging its foundations.

Interactive exhibit components, historical artifacts, iconic objects, compelling photographs, multimedia presentations, and attractive graphic displays offer visitors to RACE an eye-opening look at its important subject matter.

Developed by the American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, RACE is the first nationally traveling exhibition to tell the stories of race from the biological, cultural, and historical points of view. Combining these perspectives offers an unprecedented look at race and racism in the United States.

Other museums have been and will be hosting this exhibit as well. Current and upcoming locations include Boston, Charlotte, Santa Barbara, New Orleans, Houston, and Durham. Please visit the official website for a virtual tour and the tour schedule.

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A Long History of Racial Preferences… For Whites

Larry Adelman writes:

Many middle-class white people, especially those of us who grew up in the suburbs, like to think that we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit– hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. And while we may be sympathetic to the plight of others, we close down when we hear the words “affirmative action” or “racial preferences.” We worked hard, we made it on our own, the thinking goes, why don’t “they”? After all, it’s been almost 40 years now since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

What we don’t readily acknowledge is that racial preferences have a long, institutional history in this country– a white history.

Read more.

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Being a Father of Color is No Walk in the Park

I saw a link to this blog post in the New York Times today and thought I’d post it here for our readers. The whole thing is a compelling read, and it’s an often overlooked perspective. Here’s a sneak peek [epithets and profanity included]:

Being a father is hard in a million different ways: Balancing fatherhood with partnership; being able to do the things that I love to do on a consistent basis (for example, writing—I’m writing this at 3am, while everyone is asleep and I have a moment to myself); the loss of money; having to send your child to childcare because both parents have to work to afford all the additional costs. Working all day, coming home at night and only seeing your child for forty-five minutes before their bedtime—in these ways and more, daddyhood is hard as hell. But none of this (yes, even the money problems) even comes close to the raging difficulty of being a father of color…

When I think about it more, not being recognized or acknowledged as my daughter’s father, while painful, isn’t nearly as crazy as being a man-of-color at a park. When race, size, gender, and how we dress intersect, it disrupts social fabrics. Like I stated earlier, I play with my kid while at the playground. And if my daughter decides to play with other kids, I play with them too. I don’t touch them, because you just don’t do that—you don’t touch other people’s kids without permission. One day I was kicking a soccer ball with my daughter and some other little kids she was playing with. One of the kids, a blonde, vacant-eyed little girl, tripped, fell down, and scraped her cheek on the wood that bordered the play area. I helped her to her feet and asked her if she was okay. She looked over at her mother, who was starting intently at her cellular phone, and got nothing. She then looked at me, I looked at her, and she wailed as though the end of the world was nigh. The cellular mom looked up, fixed me with the most baleful stare, and ran over to us, dialing her phone. Instead of asking her daughter if she was okay, she snatched her up by the arm and thrust her behind her back. I then hear her telling her husband “this big nigger just pushed Miriam to the ground.” Unbelievable.

Indeed. Read the rest of his story at Daddy Dialectic.

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Because we can’t ALL win?

The Wall Street Journal had a story last week about a study that shows disparities between white and black perceptions of bias (emphasis mine):

White Americans saw an even steeper decline in anti-black bias: from 9.1, in the ’50s, to 3.6, in the ’00s. But more striking, according to the researchers, was the sharp increase in perceived anti-white bias: Among whites, it shot up from 1.8 to 4.7.

White Americans, in short, thought that anti-white bias was a greater societal problem by the ’00s than anti-black bias.

The researchers described the pattern—which did not vary markedly with regard to age or education levels—as evidence that white Americans see race relations as a zero-sum game, in which one group’s gains must be offset by another’s loss.

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