Critic Cal

This is a post for white friends who, like me, are experiencing an increased awareness of our responsibility to educate ourselves about race, racism, and white supremacy, and to submit ourselves to be changed by – and to act on – what we learn. There's some great resources out there explicitly created to help us do this: Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race , Akala's Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire  and Nikesh Shukla et al.'s The Good Immigrant  are among those I've read myself and benefited from. And Ben Lindsay's We Need to Talk About Race: Understanding the Black Experience in White Majority Churches  addresses some of the particular issues arising in a Christian context. If all this learning feels like 'effort', it is effort that is due. Overdue. Let's keep on humbly at it, yes? But everyone needs downtime ... and (to state what should be obvious) we don't need to pause becoming anti-...

I'm a reluctant traveller but there's something about the 'liminal space' of an airport that captures my imagination, drawn as it easily is towards questions of order and chaos, boundaries and negotiation, norms and transgression, "exclusion and embrace" (see, e.g., Volf) , etc. As such – and helped by the fact that my dread of missing flights tends to leave me with above-average amounts of waiting time to fill – the process of flight travel has emerged as a recurring theme among my recent poem attempts. Except ... well, even before I was done admiring my latest effort, the whole exercise struck me as grimly ironic. Just how much unheeding privilege does it take to find an airport 'interesting'?! Where I see  symbols  of the status quo (inviting my imagined metaphorical subversion), other people are experiencing the oppressively, dehumanisingly tangible outworkings of it. [1] So (a bit like a cryptography researcher who proposes a secure scheme ...

I want you to understand that, if I seem to have rather a lot to say about the current US administration, it's because, as a white evangelical Christian – albeit one with a different set of cultural baggage and without a vote – I consider myself implicated. It's my theology that has elevated Trump. It's scriptures that I revere as holy that are being used to justify the policies and behaviour of him and his associates. Songs I sing on a Sunday morning are being sung six or so hours later by Christian sisters and brother who voted for him and are openly celebrating his advancement of their cause. Books and articles and YouTube clips that do the rounds in my social networks have their origins in the minds of Christian elites whose allegiance as events unfold have proven frighteningly unswerving. There is no detaching myself. And, to be honest, the apparent detachment of other evangelicals rather disturbs than inspires me. Especially as I have a hunch that this detachment ...

Two churches, both alike in masonry, in fair Vancouver where we lay our scene... They were just across from our hotel, on adjacent corners of neighbouring blocks with nothing but a street between them. Geographically. And from the very first moment I saw them, I couldn't not feel uneasy. "In 1903 a second church was set up next door in order to accommodate the growing numbers of local residents desiring to share Christian fellowship together," said no local history pamphlet ever.  Indeed, as Sunday rolled around and I went online to explore my options (Mr. W having already opted for a lie-in) I was greeted with contrasting euphemisms. "We are an affirming church," reassured one. "We are a diverse community of families and singles," maintained the other. Hmm. Where to, then, for my own Sunday morning fix? Since I'm neither a family nor a single person perhaps you'd think this decision should've been easy. But, exploring the two web...

I was ten when O.J. Simpson's former wife Nicole and her friend Ron were found stabbed to death outside her LA home. It was the talk of the playground, handled with all the sensitivity and nuance that ten year olds typically bring to matters of mortality and justice. He definitely did it; he definitely didn't do it; he's best mates with my brother and he'll do it to you too if you don't give me your Kit Kat; say his name five times in a mirror and he'll come after you in your dreams in the guise of a chubby-cheeked children's toy carrying a machete... [1] I knew nothing about sport. As far as I was concerned, O.J. was just some guy on a baseball card. And I knew still less about race. Racism was black kids and white kids not wanting to play together, just like sexism was girls and boys refusing to sit next to each other. So the case made little coherent impact on me at the time. And even though I hope I've started to get the hang of a few things in r...