By Bob Allen A moderate Baptist ethicist compared Rep. Charlie Rangel’s recent use of the term “white cracker” to cooking celebrity Paula Deen and NFL player Riley Cooper using the “N-word.” The difference, Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for…
Judgment and empathy
By Marv Knox Let’s face it: a white person doesn’t know what being black feels like, and a man can’t completely understand a woman. But during this long, hard summer, I’ve tried. First came the George Zimmerman trial. A Hispanic…
Youth trip boosts Miss. Delta town
By Jeff Brumley No one expected a vacation Bible school run by a visiting Baptist youth group to be a catalyst for racial healing in Shaw,Miss. Yet, by all accounts that’s just what the June visit by 34 youngsters from Houston’s South Main…
Trayvon and Abdulrahman
By Leroy Seat The name Trayvon, sadly, has become a household name in the United States and elsewhere, but many do not know the name Abdulrahman. Both young men were U.S. citizens born in 1995, and both were tragically killed…
Texas Baptists hold ‘family gathering’
Editor’s note: This story was edited after posting to clarify information in the second paragraph. By Ken Camp Business took a backseat to worship and fellowship at this year’s Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting. More than 4,000 Texas…
New strides toward freedom
By Bill Leonard With the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case and the storm of Internet racism it unleashed, I can’t get Sojourner Truth out of my head. Freed in 1827, the ex-slave woman spent her life demanding an end…
Jury selection helped Zimmerman
By Alan Bean A jury comprised of five white women and one Latina has acquitted George Zimmerman on all charges. This outcome was largely determined by the way we select juries in America. Imagine that two women who looked like…
Celebrating the Ninth of July
By Leroy Seat Yesterday was Independence Day in the United States, but the Fourth of July is not one of my favorite holidays — for various reasons — but partly because the original Declaration of Independence, ratified on July 4,…
‘New Jim Crow’ turns back civil rights
By Bob Allen Four decades of America’s “war on drugs” has brought on a “New Jim Crow,” creating “a growing under-caste” primarily of people of color, and turned back many of the hard-won advances of the Civil Rights Movement, an…