Aamer Rahman is an Australian stand-up comedian of Bangladeshi descent. This “Reverse Racism” clip was recently shown at an Understanding Racism workshop I attended and is from Rahman’s album “Fear of a Brown Planet.” The reason I’m posting this is 1.) It’s genuinely funny — if we can’t laugh at ourselves, we are in trouble. […]
Love is not the Answer to America’s Race Problem
The sociological research book Divided by Faith by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith shows how white evangelical Christians see the solution to America’s race problem coming at an individual level, not a systemic or legislative level (p.115, “Let’s Be Friends” chapter). The predominant thought is that if everyone became a Christian, the race problem would […]
What To Do With Your White Privilege Besides Feel Bad About It
This is not a blog post to try to help white people understand what white privilege is and/or to persuade them to acknowledge it and do something about it. I did a blog post a few months ago that did that. It was helpful for many and received flak from others. I used the analogy […]
How Being “Color Blind” Whites Out Minorities
For most of my life, I never thought having a multiracial church mattered. I also thought racism didn’t really exist anymore. Slavery was over. Don’t use the “N word”, be nice to black people and racism is eliminated. As a rough summary, this is what a lot of white Christians think about race. If asked […]
Positioning White Privilege to Where We Actually Can Talk About it
When we hear the word “racist,” we think of KKK members, the “N-word”, or the recent comments made by Clippers owner Donald Sterling. A racist is someone who doesn’t like people of other races. Typically in America it has been seen as a white person who doesn’t like black people. When the topic of white […]
How To Talk About Racism
When I was taught about racism in school while I was growing up, I was taught about things such as the KKK, slavery, and a bit about the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow Laws. I was taught to never use the “N-Word” and to look at all people as equals, regardless of color. These […]