Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans and Working Off the Nazi Past and the American Racist Past: A Report with Excerpts

In February, I blogged a number of times about Susan Neiman's book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). As I told you in one of those postings, one reason Neiman's important book caught my attention and made me decide to read it is that Susan Neiman grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era, as I did. Neiman is, however, Jewish, and she saw the struggles for African-American rights in Atlanta through the lens of her own marginalization as a Jew, an experience I did not have growing up as a white Anglo Southerner descended from slaveholding ancestors. 

In the News: Another Day, Another Police Shooting of Unarmed Black Man; POTUS Race-Baits Again; White Evangelicals Stage Coup

These are thought-provoking things I've read in the past several days I thought I'd pass on to you; if any theme links them, it’s, Only in America:

Remembering Martin Luther King's Death: "Such Barbarism and Inhumanity . . . Are Not Really Past"

"You can't talk about #GoodFriday with any kind of moral relevance—any understanding of how Christ's crucifixion occurs all around us—without discussing police shootings"

"Between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men & women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these 'Christians' did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.”- James H. Cone, The Cross & The Lynching Tree

— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) March 30, 2018

"The Church Came Early to the Hanging": Deciphering Conversations About Race and Religion (and LGBTQ Humanity), As Trump Rises to Power

The current political context is forcing Americans to discuss race, and churchpeople have some serious reckoning to do. Not only did the church turn a blind eye to racism, but congregations would often let out early on days there was to be a lynching in the town square so parishioners could get a good seat for the festivities. The church came early to the hanging. 

~ Sandhya Jha in a review of Drew G.I. Hart's Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2016) in Christian Century

In the News This Week: New Report on History of Lynchings in U.S.

To my way of thinking, the news this week has been something like those Russian matryoshka dolls, in which doll nests inside doll, each identical to the other, a larger doll enclosing its identical offspring inside itself. Discussion of the history of American lynching connects to discussions about the alliance of the U.S. Catholic bishops with right-wing white evangelicals who are willing, in collaboration with the bishops, to rend the fabric of the nation by trampling on the Constitution, if gay citizens receive rights. Arkansas and Kansas, in their attacks on LGBT citizens, nest inside Alabama, just as the Catholic bishops nest inside Roy Moore, Mike Huckabee, and other political leaders calling for nullification of Supreme Court decisions and of the Constitution itself, insofar as it protects the rights of LGBT citizens.