Race Matters in the Classroom

In the final seconds of their struggle, Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown because of a visual impression. From Wilson's point of view, Brown appeared to him like Hulk Hogan, and like a demon. His only conceivable response, he stated, was to shoot. Six bullets ...

In recent years, I have taught an upper-level Christology course in which we examine race, gender, and power. Sometimes my students register their dissatisfaction with reading Christology from the margins (James Cone, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Marcella Althaus-Reid) instead of the center (Anselm, Barth, von Balthasar, and Rahner).  I can ...

The most uncomfortable thing I ever say among professional colleagues is that when I was a child I was taught that we are all racist. In 1970s Western Canada, where I grew up, racism was real but often obscured by polite indifference and feigned ignorance. Yet our public school system ...

Now I get it.  For the past three months, I couldn’t figure out why a jury would believe that an 18-year old unarmed man would charge – head first – toward a police officer who is shooting at him.  Soon after Michael Brown was killed on August 9, several local officials intimated ...

When Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, I was reading the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr.[1]  “The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people.  The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces ...