work for social justice

justice is what love looks like in public. – Cornel West

Please go see Call + Response this weekend if it’s opening in your town. It’s a rockumentary on the escalating problem of human trafficking & modern slavery. I am looking forward to seeing it . . . just hoping that its Chicago run is extended at least an extra week, because it opens here while we’re out of the country for a week’s vacation.

1. put together some guidelines & present them in a meeting with church leaders
2. hold some kind of more general meeting with church folks to give them the same tools
3. help to plan some community-building social events that don’t depend heavily on verbal skills (highly verbal events put those who are just learning English at a disadvantage)

I think it’s a good plan.

pretty regularly, in various realms. I decided to open this ongoing goal to process some work I’m doing with my husband & a few others in our church.

Quite a few refugees land in our part of the city, & in the past year our church has welcomed several families/groups, mostly from Burundi & Burma. They attend our services & there is ongoing relationship. Plus the Cambodian sector of our congregation is growing; these folks were refugees from the Pol Pot regime back in the 1970s, so they have been in Chicago quite a while & are well established. The group is growing simply because it’s lively & highly committed, & increasingly numbers of friends & relatives are joining in.

There are plenty of white US-born folks in the congregation too, & we love having these international people among us. However, there’s not been much apparent consciousness of the power dynamics involved when members of the majority culture become helpers to recent immigrants. Those who have arrived as refugees are constantly referred to in public as “the refugees” or even “our refugees”—ugh.

There’s also the question whether we’ll be content with just providing “direct services” (food & clothing donations, rides, etc.) & friendship or will venture into advocacy (& even protest of the policies/actions that make people refugees in the first place). My husband & I are fervently hoping for the latter.

A young friend of ours wrote an e-mail to the church leaders expressing her concerns about some of these things; she copied to me, which encouraged me to bring up the issues in a meeting yesterday to talk about coordinating ministry among refugees. Now there’s a good e-mail conversation going on, with the new coordinators expressing similar concerns. Soon some of us will get together to talk it through & come up with some thoughts on how leaders can model healthy, respectful attitudes & language. We’ll put together a proposal to present to the pastor & elders.

I’m really interested to see how much headway we can actually make. Assumptions of white privilege & of the practice of charity are so ingrained. How open will we be to transformation?

I am an elementary teacher.

I really am. I am leaving my safe secure little academic world to do just that. I want to work for the aclu or some other organization committed to social justice and civil liberties! I want to put my money where my mouth is! But I’ve got to get the job first and that part’s not coming as easy as I thought it would!!! Help!

if i could get myself to apply for this job and actually land it i’d have a much better chance at fulfilling this goal!

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” – Dr. Martin Luther King

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” – The Bible, Amos 5:24

“If you want peace, work for justice” – Henry Louis Mencken

“He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” – The Bible, Micah 6:8

“Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” – Chinese Proverb