Our quarterly print newsletter, South of the Garden, went to the printer just before Memorial Day. This issue is now available online, and you may see it in your mailbox later this week. In it, we share stories and reflections on adjusting to life in quarantine, as we explore how life has changed and notice what remains constant. Especially moving are Rebecca Welper’s words on the importance of swimming and water, how they recall her late mother and thread through swimming now, in her backyard, with her young daughter.
Memorial Day, 2020, brought to the fore, once again, our racial fault lines. A white woman used racially sophisticated language to call the police on an African-American birder in Central Park. In Minneapolis, a white police officer murdered George Floyd. Since these events our country and the world have erupted in protest.
We at RCWMS are committed to standing in solidarity with our Black neighbors. Tomorrow we will be sharing a more extensive list of resources we have found to be helpful. Here, we offer a few:
We are moved by Rev. William Barber’s May 31st sermon, “Pentecost Amidst Police Brutality, Pandemic & Poverty: A Pastoral Letter to the Nation.” He suggests “if we listen to America, if we listen, then now is the time for us not to stop mourning, but to mourn and refuse to be comforted, to unite our collective moral power and demand transformative change right now.”
Roxane Gay, in a May 30 op-ed in the New York Times, names some of the recent victims of police violence, and argues that “these names are the worst kind of refrain, an inescapable burden. These names are hashtags, elegies, battle cries. Still nothing changes. Racism is litigated over and over again when another video depicting another atrocity comes to light. Black people share the truth of their lives, and white people treat those truths as intellectual exercises.”
This is just a beginning. There’s so much to read, learn, and do. Courtney Martin reminds us that “whatever you do, don’t use the reading you haven’t yet done as an excuse for the action you haven’t yet taken. Read alongside imperfect action. Look inside yourself. Reckon with the obvious.”
Please join us, challenge us, and walk with us on this path. Work with us to make this more than an “intellectual exercise,” but rather work that can promote real, systemic change.
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