Race

Shaking the Cherry Tree: Reckoning with America’s Soul in Liberty’s Cracks

1 Comment / Race, Social Justice / Maureen Walker

We’re sitting here with heavy hearts this morning. On Sunday, February 1st – the first day of Black History Month – officials acting under the orders of DJT47 dismantled the George Washington exhibit in Independence National Historical Park. Let’s be clear about who George Washington was – not the sanctified version, the little boy who […]

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Black Joy . . . and Let the Church Say Amen!

Race / Maureen Walker

Weird things can happen when you’re just trying to walk into the post office. I was simply trying to mail a couple of packages when I saw a woman – white, perhaps in her 40’s or early 50’s – struggling to get through the door of our local P.O. She was trying to maneuver one

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Sticks and Stones and Words as Weapons

3 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

Sticks and stones may break my bones But words will never hurt me. There’s power in little ditties such as these. They have such cultural currency that we typically don’t stop to wonder whether or not they’re true. In fact, we may not even notice if they’re linguistically nonsensical or patently insulting. The pot should

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Not All Vampires Live in Transylvania or Texas or . . .

2 Comments / Race, Social Justice / Maureen Walker

The last time I worried about vampires was when I was about eleven years old. Of all of the shape-shifting monsters, vampires were the scariest because they could creep in through the creaks and crevices of your house as a barely discernible mist. They could also be deceptively charming and beautiful before they sucked the

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Two Black Women Walk Through a Door

7 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

Two Black women walked through a door. If that sentence sounds like a setup, it is. But it’s not a setup for a joke, nor is it the beginning of a “once upon a time” fable. It’s the prologue to the vicious and toxic reality of right now. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, walked

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America, America, How Does Your Wisdom Grow?

3 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

About 40 years ago, I had an intense conversation with a man whose name I don’t remember, so I will just call him Paul. Both of us were nearing completion of our graduate coursework in psychology, and we met while interviewing for a clinical internship at a south Florida university. Following those interviews, Paul announced

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“Biblelistically” Blessed: Liberating Christianity from White Supremacy

6 Comments / Race, Social Justice / Maureen Walker

One of the many gifts I received from my mother is a healthy skepticism about religiosity. Although she was a deeply devout, churchgoing, Bible-loving, Sunday School teacher, she was intensely suspicious of anything that felt like performative spirituality. I remember a neighbor who would routinely greet her with “Praise the Lord!” – instead of a

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Still Playing in the Dark?

3 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

Nothing has as much durability as a racialized trope. Memories of 60’s television include racing downstairs with my cousins to see the “Negro” who had been spotted in a soap commercial. Believe me, it was a race-worthy event (pun fully intended). At that time, Black bodies were rarely represented in the media except in highly

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A “Karen” by Any Other Name . . .

3 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

In gratitude and memoriam for Erica Garner, Heather Heyer, Fannie Lou Hamer, Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Parker, Ida B. Wells, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg I know. I can hear the indignant objections now. Somehow in the past two years, what was a “comical” media meme is now loaded with racialized invective, evoking everything from

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Whose Story Is It?

7 Comments / Race / Maureen Walker

All this talk about history and statues reminded me of my third-grade lessons in Mrs. Bennett’s class. It was there that I learned to recite this little ditty: In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue… October 12 their dream came true You never saw a happier crew! At seven

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Black Joy . . . and Let the Church Say Amen!

Sticks and Stones and Words as Weapons

Two Black Women Walk Through a Door

America, America, How Does Your Wisdom Grow?

Still Playing in the Dark?

A “Karen” by Any Other Name . . .

Whose Story Is It?

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