Several years ago if you had showed me a protest sign with the words “Defund the Police” written on it,

I would have thought that the person who wrote that sign was a little extreme. Maybe even a radical.

Just five years ago, if you had tried to tell me that we should close all the prisons in our country, I would have thought you were crazy. 

I would have said, “Where would we put all the bad guys?” 

I would have said, “Who will protect us from the rapists and murderers?”

I would have conceded that maybe we need to reform the police and the prisons. 

I would have agreed that the police need to be trained to not act on implicit racial bias.

I would have said that we need to do better at holding police accountable, but I would not have imagined a world in which we do not have police or prisons.

In 2014, I watched from my home in Scotland as police in riot gear attacked protesters in Ferguson. It was the first time I felt that perhaps the police did not actually exist to protect and to serve. 

Then in the fall of 2015, I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

In his book, I read story after story of Black brothers and sisters being imprisoned without trial, many without guilt, and at shockingly increasing rates. 

This one book set me on a journey of reading about Mass Incarceration in the United States. (It has now been made into a movie and is free to watch for the month of June on all platforms.)

After I read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, I began to imagine a world without prisons. I looked at how other developed countries rehabilitate people who have committed crimes instead of locking them up and forgetting about them.

The next year (2016), the documentary 13th was released on Netflix and confirmed for me what by then I already knew in my heart: that I want to live in a world where the police (including ICE) and prisons no longer exist. 

By the year 2016, I would have called myself an abolitionist. 

Not because I was working tirelessly for the abolition of police and prisons, but because even though I could not quite clearly see the way forward, I knew in my heart that the current system, one which was built entirely on white supremacy, must be dismantled in order for there to ever be true equality in our country. 

So I joined racial justice book clubs and marched with the Poor Peoples’ Campaign. Every time another Black man or woman had their life stolen from them by police, I lamented over their names, turned into hashtags for a movement that seemed stuck in molasses.

Eric Garner

Philando Castile

Michael Brown

Trayvon Martin

Tamir Rice

Walter Scott

Natasha McKenna

Kendrec McDade

Sandra Bland

Botham Jean

Oscar Grant

Atatiana Jefferson

Kenneth Chamberlain

Samuel DuBose

Ahmaud Arbery

Breonna Taylor

And then finally,

George Floyd

Now, in 2020, I have had the benefit of sitting for several years with the knowledge that the police force came into existence to capture runaway slaves. And after slavery was abolished, prison labor evolved to continue the institution under another name. 

In this moment, I am watching in horror as police who are armed to the teeth attack protesters all over the country, inciting violence even where there is none. I am horrified, but I am not surprised.

The violence that I see police enacting on my brothers and sisters in the streets is born of a violence that is also running through my DNA. My ancestors believed that Black bodies were not worthy of the same love, dignity and status as white bodies. 

We now know (because science) that we store trauma in our DNA and pass it down to our children. (The stress of generations of racism is causing Black women to die in childbirth at higher rates in our country, regardless of their current circumstances.) 

As white people, when we read slave narratives or stories of white mobs lynching Black men and women, we usually either look away or we think: How could they do that?  

In the same way that we think we would never have sent Jesus to the cross or Jewish people to concentration camps, we think that we would never have owned, tortured or killed Black people. 

But we don’t always stop and think about the hate, anger and shame that a person must allow to take hold in their hearts in order to enact such horrors. And as “good white people,” we are wholly unaware of how that same hate, anger and shame is running through our own bodies. These days I call that hate, anger and shame what I think it is: white supremacy.

White supremacy cannot be reformed. And though reading and studying is a help, white supremacy cannot be “read” or “studied” away. (Believe me, friends, if it was possible to eradicate white supremacy from within your heart by reading the right books, watching the right movies, and listening to the right podcasts, I would know.)

I am growing in an understanding of how I can move the trauma of my ancestral history of white supremacy out of my body, but I am still a baby in this work. As a life-long reader and thinker, the entire field of “body work” has not come easily to me, but I am learning from many teachers, including trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem. He teaches about using body work specifically for racial trauma. (He explains the research of how we store trauma in our DNA in this podcast and he is a guest on Krista Tippet’s podcast here, and then his book My Grandmother’s Hands is full of exercises that help us sit with and move the trauma out of our bodies.)

But the longer I live and wrestle with my place in the world with regards to racial inequality, the more I am convinced that the way forward is to lose everything. 

To un-build all that has been built. To let go of all that I am holding onto. 

It’s funny that somehow I am surprised that the way forward in eradicating white supremacy is also the way forward in following Jesus.

To commit to a life of downward mobility.

To lose my life in order to save it. 

Often in our spiritual lives, we have to let go of something before we get to see what comes next. 

We almost never get to just trade one thing for another. 

We have to make space by releasing.

And then waiting. 

Maybe asking who is going to “save our lives” if we let go of policing and prisons is the wrong question.

Maybe we could ask instead if we are willing to release the unjust system we have now, in order to make room for something else to unfold.

And then we wait.

Allow the space to imagine something new. 

I will not fight to protect things that have been built. I only want to protect people.

And I want to start with the lives that we have oppressed for over 400 years in the US. 

I want to start by reframing my white body to know all the way down to my DNA that Black Lives Matter.

I believe a more beautiful world is possible, but first I think we have to let go of the one we have built. 

We have a lot of tearing down to do. 

But as the honorable Dr. Rev. William Barber

and Dr. Rev. Anika Whitfield of Little Rock have taught me to say (or rather to sing),

We have nothing to lose but our chains. 

PS. Here’s a helpful resource guide on prison and police abolition if you want to do a little reading of your own. 

The post Imagining Something New appeared first on Alison Chino.

I want to be a part of creating a greater awareness about our nation’s dark history, not just slavery, but the way that slavery evolved from generation to generation. I want to be a part of de-throning white supremacist rule, and I believe that creating awareness is a step towards that end. It doesn’t seem like we can create justice without looking honestly at the ways we’ve been unjust.

This is a quote from EJI’s website about the purpose of this project:

To create greater awareness and understanding about racial terror lynchings, and to begin a necessary conversation that advances truth and reconciliation, EJI is working with communities to commemorate and recognize the traumatic era of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites across the country and erecting historical markers in these spaces. 

In February 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a new report documenting over 4000 lynchings and so began a soil collection project to mark those lynchings:

While collecting soil from the site of a lynching is a simple gesture, we believe it is an important act of remembrance that can begin a process of recovery and reconciliation to our history of lynching and terror. The named containers with collected soil that we create become important pieces of our broken and terrifying past. We believe these jars represent the hope of community members who seek racial justice and a greater commitment to the rule of law and human rights.

EJI has documented 492 African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Arkansas, so when I moved back to North Little Rock last fall, I got in touch with EJI and asked if I could participate in collecting soil for any of these victims.

Earlier this year, I received my first instructions for the collection of soil in DeWitt, Arkansas for a man named Mr. Frank Dodd. A couple of Saturdays ago, I drove over to DeWitt with two friends to do the collection. The site of Mr. Dodd’s lynching was unknown, but he was taken by a mob from the Arkansas County Jail, which is now the site of the Arkansas County Circuit Clerk’s Office, so we were asked to choose a tree in the square as a symbolic place to gather soil for Mr. Dodd.

We walked around the courthouse before choosing our spot. My friend, Sarabeth read Nehemiah 9 aloud to us. She had been studying it that week and was particularly struck by the laments the Israelites prayed for the sins of their ancestors.

As three white women collecting soil on behalf of Mr. Dodd, we certainly felt it was applicable to lament the sins of our ancestors.

As we stood in the square, I read aloud the story from EJI about Mr. Dodd’s murder, which I will include below in full.

Then we prayed, lamenting this life that was taken, lamenting the way racism and white supremacy have torn apart families and destroyed so many lives. We lamented the way it sometimes seems that the legacy of racial terror has bequeathed to us a nation so steeped in systemic racism that we cannot ever find our way to true equality.

It had rained the night before we arrived, and the air was still hanging heavy with water. The soil we collected was a dark clay-like mud. We dug it up from the ground beneath trees that were old enough to have born witness to the mob that gathered there in 1916.

I hope to one day visit the memorial in Montgomery that is opening this spring. I’ll look for the jar that we sent to remember Mr. Frank Dodd and I’ll remember the wet March Saturday that we drove to DeWitt to fill it.

My prayer is that many generations will stand after me in front of it. My prayer is that we will reckon with our history in a way that causes us to stop repeating it.

Dear Lord, forgive us.

I hope more people read Mr. Frank Dodd’s story. I hope many people visit the memorial in Montgomery and read EJI’s report on Lynching in America. I hope to see a day when black parents no longer have to warn their children that our American society does not value them.

Frank Dodd
Arkansas County, Arkansas, October 8, 1916

On October 8, 1916, a mob of about 300 white men broke into the Arkansas County Jail and seized Frank Dodd, an African American man, from his cell, determined to lynch him. Several news reports said that Mr. Dodd became the lynch mob’s target on the accusation of “having annoyed a young white woman.”

According to news accounts, the evening before Mr. Dodd was lynched, he encountered two white women, who passed him in a wagon, and asked them for a ride. Later, one of the women accused Mr. Dodd of insulting her in the course of their interactions and that it was not until she screamed that a nearby white farmer chased Mr. Dodd away. Although Mr. Dodd was not accused of harming anyone, he was later captured by the deputy sheriff and eventually transferred to the Arkansas County Jail in DeWitt.

During the era of racial terrorism, whites’ allegations against black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal. Whites’ fears of interracial sex further stoked racially based hostility and extended to any action by an African American man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman. Though the woman had claimed Mr. Dodd ‘annoyed’ her, some sensationalized white newspaper accounts accused Mr. Dodd of “assault.” During this era, “assault” allegations against African American men were often based on merely looking at or accidentally bumping into a white woman, smiling, winking, getting too close, even being disagreeable. In Mr. Dodd’s case, the mere accusation of “annoying” a white woman was enough to arouse mob retaliation.

On October 8th, a white lynch mob of as many as 300 white men formed at the jail and seized Mr. Dodd at gunpoint. Although police officers were charged with protecting those in their custody, white officers rarely used force to resist white mobs intent on killing black people. The lynch mob took Mr. Dodd to the “outskirts” of Dewitt, hanged him from a tree near the local African American community, riddled his body with bullets and left it suspended from a branch. Members of the neighboring African American community later retrieved Mr. Dodd’s body and delivered him to the care of his wife and a local undertaker.

Just two months before, another black man had been abducted from the Arkansas County Jail and lynched. Surviving reports don’t indicate that anyone was ever arrested for either murder.

Frank Dodd was one of at least 18 African Americans victims of racial terror lynching killed in Arkansas County from 1877-1950. Philips County was the only county in the state with more documented lynchings.

The post EJI’s Community Remembrance Project: Collecting Soil for Mr. Frank Dodd appeared first on Alison Chino.

After the election, I was reading the news, lamenting on Twitter, and trying to listen to the voices that I felt were most marginalized by the comments our newly elected president had made on his campaign trail.

Listen and lament.

Listen and lament.

But after about a week, I was drowning in a sea of despair. I was starting to think I was going to have to shut the internet down, but I also felt like it would be an unacceptable exercising of privilege to close my ears and eyes to the emboldened racism and rampant hate-related instances unfolding all around the country.

So at some point, I was moved (probably by the Holy Sprit) to type into my Google search bar something to the effect of: Black Christian Perspective On Election Results.

Somehow my search led me to an article you wrote about feeling betrayed by white evangelicals in the wake of the election. You explained that for your white brothers and sisters to ignore the racist rhetoric was to dangerously underestimate the power of words and the impact they have on the groups which the rhetoric is intended to marginalize.

And then you ended with these words.

Because of Christ, I am willing to be part of a body that constantly underestimates the ongoing impact of racism. Because of Jesus, I am willing to associate with believers who outright deny systemic and institutional forms of inequality based on race. Because of our unity in the Spirit, I am willing to fellowship with believers who rebuke me for my honesty, and accuse me of sowing division because I speak of difficult subjects. I am still here. Bear with me if I sometimes long to worship with people who share not only my theology, but my pain as well.

As a member of a church that is trying to bridge racial divides, I do not take lightly the willingness of anyone from the minority culture to worship with me.

I have grown to understand how much people of color have given up in order to participate in racial reconciliation, in order to walk back into to churches from which their parents and grandparents were actively excluded.

So I was humbled by your willingness to remain part of a body that “constantly underestimates the ongoing impact of racism.” And it reminded me again that the black people in my church have to face the same struggle, worshipping alongside a group of believers who have (in some numbers) voted for and continue to support a president who is stripping away any small steps of progress towards equality.

As a result of landing on that one article and reading several others, I began to faithfully listen to the podcast Pass the Mic, where I began to hear you and Tyler Burns discuss issues and culture from a distinctly black Christian perspective.

Which is a perspective this white girl needs to hear.

The longer I listen, the more voices I hear. And the more I learn.

Through your podcast, I also grew to know and love the Truth’s Table podcast.

You also introduced me to the writings at the blog (Black Perspectives) of the African American Intellectual History Society, where I have read countless stories and been introduced to new books that have grown my world exponentially.

I could go on and on, but mainly I just wanted to write and say thank you.

Thank you for your willingness to keep engaging with a community that consistently   underestimates the ongoing impact of racism.

Thank you for creating spaces where I can learn. I know that those spaces are not for me, but I am grateful to be invited along to listen and open my heart.

I hope you will keep writing, speaking, reading, tweeting and holding truth for us all to see.

With gratitude and grace,

Alison

A note to my readers:

If you want to check out the podcast, Pass The Mic, here are a couple of my favorite episodes:

This interview with Andy Crouch is a particularly great listen for white folks. Note: the podcast’s target audience is black listeners, so if you’re white, you might be asking yourself why you would join a conversation that is not for you? One good answer is that when I am in a place where my own experience excludes me from understanding what the speakers’ have encountered, I am being let in on something special. I get to listen and learn.

Bryan Stevenson (interviewed here) is a national treasure. Seriously, I think in 100 years we’ll be talking about this guy like we do Ghandi.

And if you are involved in any kind of racial reconciliation in churches, the 4-part series that Truth’s Table did on this topic is required listening. This one with Laura Pritchard is my favorite.

The post An Open Letter to Jemar Tisby appeared first on Alison Chino.

Dear White People (including myself),

As Black History Month wraps up, I want to make a plea that we all choose not be done with Black History for the year.

Current events are daily revealing how necessary it is that all Americans learn Black History all year long.

For how long?

For as long as it takes for us to unwrite the rules we wrote when our brothers and sisters were enslaved and we did not count them as people.

For as long as it takes to unmake a system that has its roots planted deeply in white supremacy.

For as long as it takes for us to consider Black History as an integral part of American History, embedded in our lives and national stories, just like The Mayflower, The Pilgrims and Independence Day.

Extensive reading is my preferred (and maybe too easy) method of becoming awake to how the decks are stacked against our black and brown brothers and sisters in this country. But I am committing this year not to just reading about racism, but also to talking about it, to writing about it regularly and to calling it out in myself.

Let me say that again.

I am committed to calling out racism in myself.

Lamenting it.

Confessing it.

Repenting of it.

I like to say that I am about 67% woke. (That’s probably generous.)

Woke refers to a state of being aware of racial injustice in the world.

So if I am 67% woke, that still leaves like 33% of me that is asleep, that is ruled by racism.

I was raised in a country that was founded on white supremacy, so I am going to have a natural bent towards participating in racism that is both underlying and overt.

I am repenting of being complicit in a system that has sold itself out in a grab for power. I am so sad that I am a part of tradition that was meant to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world and instead seems to be the second coming of the Pharisees. I cannot make it right by saying I am not a part of the group, or I am not one of those kind of Christians. Somehow I stood by while we were seduced by the empire and so I participated.

For years and years, I was content to sit in a church on Sunday morning filled with people who looked like me, to fill the seats at my table with people who looked like me. I was content to read only books about people who looked like me, and I studied history that was missing the pieces that explain why life is so different for people who did not look like me.

I am lamenting that I did not notice how wrong this was. I am lamenting that my unwillingness to cross racial lines has contributed to walls that exist today, and to the rhetoric that is adding more bricks every day to those very walls, causing them to be thicker and harder to break down.

I confess that I have contributed to an atmosphere where we need to say out loud that Black Lives Matter, because the blood on the streets shows that these words are not a given. We must say that Black Lives Matter so that maybe one day we will live in a country where that is true to everyone. In fact, I believe that if we had made it true that Black Lives Matter then we would also have solved the problem of welcoming refugees, because if we raise up and value the lives of those who are different from us, then we will continue to do it with refugees, with Muslims, and with anyone we have designated as “other.”

And so I repent that I personally have not always shown with my actions in the world that Black Lives Matter.

I repent that I have acted as though I am owed the privilege that I was born with. I pass through borders and drive by police cars without fear. I walk into stores and restaurants and never doubt that I will be treated with respect. I expect to have the very best possible schools for my children, without regard for the effect my school choices have on the districts and towns in which we have lived.

If I live to be 100 I cannot undo what I have done to uphold the standard of white supremacy in the US, and this fact overwhelms me. It overwhelms me so much that I considered not writing this letter. But even if I cannot undo all the things or do all that must be done, I can try.

I can do the little that I know how to do today. And tomorrow I can try to learn about another thing. I can work towards another half percent of being woke.

And I would be so honored if you would join me.

That’s why I am making this page into a Resource List, a page that I can add to whenever I come across something that contributes to my awareness of racial injustice. You can come back to it and read again and again because this journey towards racial reconciliation is long.

But I think the long journeys are the ones worth taking.

And I think that God is with us on the long journeys.

And when I think about Martin Luther King Jr, and I listen to his speeches, I remember how bravely he stood in the face of a long uphill climb that he knew would probably end in death.

And so how dare I grow tired?

If I ever say I am tired of hearing about racism, I will call myself out and repent.

Because, friends, think of how weary our black and brown brothers and sisters are of this battle.

So very weary. I hear it in their words. Laments for hard won changes that are given only to be revoked again or never enforced.

Let us not grow weary in doing good. Let us each find the part we have to do and do it. Let us lament. Let us confess. Let us repent.

Then maybe we can rise together.

In solidarity,

Alison

Reading Resource List

This is just a start on this list. I will continue to add to it. If you know of something I should add, feel free to send me an email (alison AT alisonchino DOT com) or tell me on Twitter.

Children’s Books 

Black History Children’s Books

Sit In by Andrea Davis Pinkney

Let Freedom Sing by Vanessa Newton

The Youngest Marcher by Cynthia Levinson

The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles

The Great Migration with paintings by Jacob Lawrence

God Bless The Child by Billie Holiday, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

March by John Lewis 

Children’s Books for Talking About Race

All the Colors We Are: The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color by Katie Kissinger

The Skin I’m In by Pat Thomas

Shades of People by Sheila M. Kelly

Children’s Books with Black or Brown Protagonists

Chocolate Me by Taye Diggs

Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman

Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold

The Snowy Day  by Ezra Jack Keats

The Barber’s Cutting Edge by Gwendolyn Battle-Lavert

Dancing in the Wings by Debbie Allen

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Concrete Rose (forthcoming) by Angie Thomas

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi

Another great resource for children’s books is the website We Need Diverse Books.

Books (nonfiction)

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Patillo Beales

The Long Shadow of Little Rock by Daisy Bates

Walking With The Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by  Ibram X. Kendi

How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Just Mercy Brian Stevenson

The New Jim Crow by Michelle WIlliams

Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackman

America’s Original Sin Jim Wallis

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

White Awake by Daniel Hill

Race and Place: How Urban Geography Shapes the Journey to Reconciliation by David P. Leong

Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores by Dominique DuBois Gilliard

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

How to be Less Stupid About Race by Dr. Crystal M. Fleming

The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris

They Were Her Property: White Women As Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E Jones-Rogers

So You Wanna Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Never Caught: The Washingtons Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in A World Made For Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity by David E Swanson

May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem by Imani Perry

Books (Fiction)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (anything by Toni Morrison)

Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (anything by James Baldwin)

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry

Song Yet Sung by James McBride

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

Glory Over Everything by Kathleen Grissom

The Water Dancer Ta-Nehisi Coates

Memoirs by Black Authors

Thick by Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

Heavy by Dr. Kiese Laymon

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Becoming Ms Burton by Susan Burton

Rabbit by Patricia Williams

When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Cullors

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

The Color of Water by James McBride

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry

No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America by Darnell L. Moore

Movies

Malcolm X

Selma

13th

Twelve Years A Slave

Ruby Bridges

Mississippi Burning

The Color Purple

The Hate U Give

Marshall

If Beale Street Could Talk

Just Mercy

When They See Us (series)

Articles 

Anything on the website Black Perspectives

The Racism of Good Intentions by Carlos Lozada

This is the best explanation I’ve ever seen of White Privilege by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

White Debt by Eula Bliss (first line: “The Word for debt in German also means guilt.”)

White People: I Don’t Want You To Understand Me Better, I Want You To Understand Yourselves. by Ijeoma Oluo

This is what an antiracist America would look like. How do we get there?
Ibram X Kendi

Southern Baptist Seminary Documents History of Racial Injustice

The Cost of the Confederacy by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler

1619 Series in the NY Times

Punishment by Pandemic

Racism is Terrible. Blackness is not. by Imani Perry

Literary Quilt: A Covering for George Floyd: 15 Black authors give voice to the current unrest and movement for Black lives

Podcasts

On Being consistently has great content regarding race. Here are a few of my favorite episodes:

Love in Action with John Lewis

Let’s Talk about Whiteness with Eula Bliss

The Heart is the Last Frontier with Isabel Wilkerson

Where Does It Hurt? with Ruby Sales

Who We Want To Become: Beyond The New Jim Crow with Michelle Alexander

W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul with Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander and Arnold Rampersad

Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence with Resmaa Menakem

Pass The Mic is another podcast I appreciate for discussions concerning a diverse church. It is the podcast of the website The Witness (a Black Christian Collective), a great resource for Christians who want to explore more diverse perspectives. They also have a great episode on the use of term “woke.” One of my favorite episodes is their interview with Bryan Stevenson.

Truth’s Table. 

How Not To Accidentally Raise A Racist (The Longest Shortest Time)

Shots Fired Part 1 and Part 2 (Radiolab)

Object Anyway (More Perfect)

Poverty Myth Busters (On The Media)

Seeing White (series by Scene on Radio)

Monumental Lies (Reveal)

The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done (On The Media)

1619 Podcast

White Lies

Ear Hustle

Brene Brown with Austin Channing Brown

Brene Brown with Ibram X Kendi

 Videos

This video of Adam Thomason explaining racial preference.

A short documentary about this reign of terror by lynching in the US put out by the Equal Justice Initiative.

MTV’s Documentary White People

Ruby Sales on “How we can start to heal the pain of racial division”

Clint Hill Smith on Raising a Black Son in America

The post A Letter to White People (including Myself) + Reading and Resource List appeared first on Alison Chino.

Happy Thanksgiving Friends!

(That’s me waving to you from across the pond!)

Since I am not cooking a turkey or even baking making Grandmother’s rolls today, I thought I would take a few minutes to share a collection of the thoughts of my heart from the past week or so.

Because I am just a little sad that Black Friday has become such big business that we have managed to export it to the UK, I am framing my musings today with a title that is just my tiny little drop-in-the-bucket protest of my favorite holiday of all time (Thanksgiving) being co-opted into the start of consumer holiday frenzy.

Five Things I Wish We Would Do On Black Friday Instead Of Shopping. 

1. Continue Giving Thanks.

If you’ve made a giant meal today, you don’t have to cook tomorrow, so you have more time for practicing thanksgiving.

O give thanks to the Lord for He is good; For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

1 Chronicles 16:34

Once upon a time I began a practice of gratefulness.

A simple ritual of writing down things for which I am thankful.

And friends, it is not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

Five years ago, I wrote these words about this practice:

One of the ways I know God is real is that when I ask at the end of a weary day that He would show me what to thank Him for,

He reveals to my heart the gifts I don’t have the eyes to see.

Need a little help. You can make this thanksgiving tree with your family! We’re doing this at our house today and throughout the weekend.

2. Prepare For Christmas.

There are so many other ways to get ready for Christmas than to shop. It seems like it becomes harder every year to make time for the practices that bring our hearts the most peace, hope and joy during this season.

Maybe ask the people around you how they are planning to let the light in to their Christmas season. I have a sheet of paper I’ve been using to brainstorm ideas for the holidays for the last several weeks. Anytime I think, “Oh I wish we would do that this year!” I write down whatever “that” is (ice skating, making cookies for neighbors, reading a family Christmas devotional every day, etc). This weekend I’m going to take that list and put the items on the calendar that I feel like we can fit in this year.

And if you must shop to prepare for Christmas, maybe think about how to shop mindfully? I think it would be lovely to set a challenge of only buying items that bring hope and love to others. Items from a Heifer or World Vision catalog. Or only buying fair trade. It may seem like such a small thing to hand someone a handmade trinket for Christmas instead of a new electronic, but it’s no small thing to the hands that made it.

3. Do Justice.

I have spent a lot of time this season reading about refugees and I’ve discovered something that I am having trouble understanding.

Just before WWII, when both the UK and the US were experiencing food and housing shortages, these two great nations together took in almost 200,000 Jewish refugees.

Today, when both of these countries are radically wealthy, they have committed to taking only 10,000 refugees each, and even that number is consistently facing reduction by legislation.

The crazy bit is that I think if any of us could go back in time and take more Jewish refugees (Anne Frank’s family was denied access to the US), we absolutely would. We would say, YES! Let them come. 200,000 was not enough. 

I can’t work out in my heart what the difference is between then and now.

During WWII, the messages posted all around our nations were about saving and stretching what we have to make it work.

Since 9/11, we have been bombarded with the falsehood that the most patriotic action we can take for our country is to spend more money.

It’s as if I am holding the two times in my two hands and wondering how we got from:

Save all you can and share with the refugee.

to

Spend even what you don’t have, but we have no room for the refugee.

Here’s a paragraph from the most recent briefing I received from World Vision UK about Syrian refugees:

2 million children have become refugees and 5.6 million children in Syria need life-saving assistance. As the crisis drags on, the situation is getting more desperate for families. Families are running out of savings and struggle to provide food, shelter or warm clothing. Many refugees now live on food rations worth only £9 a month, with the cost of living in Syria response countries similar to many Western countries. Many families can no longer afford to send their children to school. Outside refugee camps, only 6% of Syrian school age children in Lebanon, 44% in Jordan and 14% in Turkey attend school. Youth unemployment in Lebanon has reached 78%. Families are marrying off their girls early to help them survive, as well as risking dangerous migration opportunities to survive. Without further action, we risk losing a generation to unemployment, poverty, lack of education and hopelessness.

As the rhetoric in America increases about blocking entrance to refugees, I suppose I wish that at the very least, if we’re going to make it impossible to leave the country (that we ourselves are bombing), could we at least take all that money we were going to spend on a new XBOX, TV, iPhone and give it to improve the dire circumstances in countries like Lebanon, where there are now 1.5 million refugees.

4. Love Mercy.

Last week I read a book that rocked my world.

As is often the case when I read a book that takes me to a place I did not know existed and proceeds to break my heart, I can’t stop talking about it and and I want everyone I know to read it.

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his life seeking justice for those most desperate: “the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system.”

Just Mercy is a collection of stories from his years of doing this incredibly gut-wrenching work.

This may not be an incentive to read, but sometimes I would have to set the book down after I finished one of the stories just to take a deep breath through my tears.

Trina Garnett’s story was one of those. Her story was also told in a news article almost three years ago. And she took part in this powerful video from Muncy State Prison. She’s the one in the wheelchair who speaks at the end of the video. She’s been in prison for over forty years, after being sentenced to life without parole at the age of fourteen for starting a fire that resulted in the deaths of two children.

I walked away from reading Just Mercy with a sense that I need a greater understanding of what Stevenson describes as the four institutions that have shaped the lives of people of color in America:

The first three are: Slavery, A Reign of Terror, and Jim Crow.

The fourth is Mass Incarceration.

I’ll leave you with a quote about prison growth in America that I found wildly disturbing:

In the 1990s, America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting ‘prison-industrial complex’ -the business interests that capitalize on prison construction- made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything–health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavior disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.

5. Walk Humbly.

Of course, I can’t let the opportunity pass to include going for a walk on any list of activities.

But I’ve shared some heavy things.

When my heart is heavy, the best place for me to take it is outside.

To lift my eyes to the heavens and ask the Lord when He is going to come back?

To cry out to God for the brokenness in our world, but then to stand at the shore and wonder at how there is still so much beauty in it.

To Chase the Daylight even when the darkness is closing in.

Wishing you love, mercy, grace and peace today wherever you are! I’m thankful for everyone who reads my ramblings from my little corner of the internet.

XO

Alison

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