Social Justice Saturday: What Is Our Real Work?

 

The impeded stream

 There are, it seems two muses: the muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, “It is more difficult than you thought.”

This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.



The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 - Wendell Berry (Collected Poems)

Social Justice Saturday: George Washington Carver's Environmental Legacy

George Washington Carver is primarily remembered as the man who found hundreds of uses for peanuts, making it an important Southern crop.  That's only one small part of Carver's story.

As he grew up in the years after the Civil War, he became fascinated by gardening, herbal medicines, and collected herbs and flowers. His talents led him to Iowa State Agricultural School, where he earned a master’s in agriculture in 1896. Booker T. Washington invited Carver to help start the agricultural school at the new Tuskegee Institute, where Carver's his primary goal was to make the farmland more productive, in order to liberate Black farmers from a farming system designed to keep them dependent upon white landowners.

Overproduction of cotton had drained the soil of its nutrients. “When my train left the golden wheat fields and the tall green corn of Iowa for the acres of cotton, nothing but cotton, my heart sank a little,” Carver recalled in a 1941 radio broadcast. “Fields and hillsides cracked and scarred with gullies and deep rut. Everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle, and the people.”

Carver 's research showed that rotating nitrogen-rich cover crops of peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes would reinvigorate the land, increasing yields and diversifying farmers’ food supply. This in turn helped Black farmers grow more food while spending less money, getting them closer to food sovereignty.

Carver became famous — in Black and white communities alike — for his work.  Time named him a “Black Leonardo” in 1941. And in 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the creation of the George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American and the first to honor someone other than a president

Carver understood that when land suffers, those who tend it do, too. Emphasizing that link is a key strategy for contemporary organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and you can draw a line between Carver’s beliefs, the Green New Deal, and the recognition that social and economic concerns are inextricable from ecological ones. They’re all part of what Carver saw as an infinite, interconnected web, as he took some of the first steps in the long march toward racial and environmental justice that continues today.

-- "The Land-healing Work of George Washington Carver," by Brianna Baker, at Grist, Feb. 12, 2021.

 

Social Justice Saturday: The Power of Stories

February is Black History Month, and we have the opportunity to learn about the stories of many Black individuals and communities in our country’s history. As we listen and view these stories, writer Chimamanda Adichie reminds us: “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

She also talks about the “danger of a single story,” and describes how, as a child growing up in Nigeria and loving to write stories, she wrote about white children drinking tea in London, because those were the children’s stories available to her. She was much older before she learned she could write stories about her own Nigerian people and communities.

What stories do you hold about those different from you? Multiple stories or only one? Do your stories come from experiences with a variety of people, or from stereotypes in movies and TV? How might stories you hear this month expand your awareness of the rich variety of experiences of black people in the United States?

Social Justice Saturday: A Prayer for A New President

A Prayer for a New President

God of all nations,

Creator of the human family,

we give you thanks for the freedom we exercise

and the many blessings of democracy

in our country.

We ask for your protection and guidance

for all who devote themselves to the common good,

working for justice and peace at home and around the world.

We lift up all our duly elected leaders and public servants,

those who will serve us as President, Vice-President and their administration.

Let them, with us, move forward with a common purpose, dedication, and commitment to achieve liberty and justice,

health and safety,

for all people,

and especially those who are most vulnerable in our midst.

Amen.

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Social Justice Saturday: Acknowledging Racist Policies and Ideas

The storming of the Capitol highlighted yet another example of racist law enforcement policy .  As President-elect Biden said in responding to the situation,  "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn't have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol," he said. "We all know that's true, and it is unacceptable."

Recognizing racist policies and ideas and acknowledging and confronting these policies and ideas is antiracist. 

Ibrim X. Kendi, in How To Be An Antiracist, clarifies, "The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities.  We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next.  What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment determines what--not who--we are." 

 

Social Justice Saturday: Equality and Equity

In Massachusetts the vaccination roll-out is now open to all those older than 75. That appears to be an equal way to offer the vaccine, first-come-first-served. Yet the numbers suggest many more white people are vaccinated than black and brown people. In this situation, equal is not equitable.

Check out a short you-tube explanation of the difference between equal and equitable.

What might be a more equitable way to distribute vaccines?

Social Justice Saturday: The Work of Christmas

May we do this work with music in our hearts!

May we do this work with music in our hearts!

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nation,
To bring peace among all,
To make music in the heart.

By Howard Thurman