Another Black woman has been called “Jezebel,” a racial stereotype and slur that historically and persistently has been used to obfuscate the truth, promote and justify racial inequality and sexual violence against Black women. According to Baptist News Global, two…
Pastors, will you speak up when a Black woman is demeaned?
The recent tweet from Pastor Tom Buck referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Jezebel” invoked a long-standing racist and misogynistic image. Pastor Buck, an East Texas pastor and member of the Southern Baptist Convention, went on to defend…
Your words hold the power of life and death
In the age of social media, it’s easy to forget the power our words have on others. Sitting behind the safety of a computer screen makes it simple for us to say whatever we think with little consequence. With the…
Black church important antidote to social despair caused by white supremacy
The Black church in America plays a crucial role in empowering its congregants amid the reality of white supremacy that causes a growing number of Black Americans to feel insecure, new research finds. Despite the election of Raphael Warnock as…
‘While there is still time’: American churches, violence and conspiracy theories
In his classic book Night, the late Boston University professor Elie Wiesel described how the first warnings of what became the Holocaust found their way into his family’s village of Sighet, Transylvania, in 1942. The messenger was an “outsider” called…
Pastors Buck and Swofford, get the biblical story of Jezebel straight!
On Jan. 22, Tom Buck, pastor of First Baptist Church of Lindale, Texas, equated Vice President Kamala Harris with the biblical Jezebel. It was a strategic insult designed to terrorize and imbrute Harris. He joined Steve Swofford, pastor of First…
A letter to the white church in America
On April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., for leading a nonviolent demonstration for human rights. While he was being detained, he was given a newspaper that contained a statement written by eight white preachers….
No ifs, ands or butts: Binary thinking makes the Christian life hard to wear
Binary thinking is the butt crack of the body of Christ. Yes, I’m being cheeky, but the reality is that our Christian faith gets sucked into the bottom half of a sagging belief system sort of like when a person…
A second SBC pastor in Texas called Vice President Kamala Harris ‘Jezebel’
It turns out that East Texas pastor Tom Buck wasn’t the first Southern Baptist pastor in Texas to call Vice President Kamala Harris a “Jezebel.” Steve Swofford, pastor of First Baptist Church of Rockwall, Texas, located in the eastern suburbs…
The death penalty is dying a slow death; it’s time we pull the plug
The death penalty is dying in America. I cheer its death. Capital punishment has been abolished in 22 states. Ten of the remaining 28 states have not had an execution in a decade. According to the Death Penalty Information Center,…
Amid the hypocrisy of critiquing ‘unity,’ maybe we need a different goal: Cooperation
We need to debunk the argument that achieving “unity” means everyone will get their way. That’s not logically possible. This fallacious thinking is emerging as a primary conservative critique of the new administration in Washington, D.C. And once again, it…
‘God bless white America’: Why we need to overturn white racial mythologies
On June 17, 2015, a young white stranger walked into a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. (sometimes known as “Mother Emanuel” because of its role as one of America’s most historic Black churches). That…