White Privilege: Confessions of a Poor White Girl by Cynthia Garrity-Bond

August 4, 2016August 4, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Worth the read. I am a white mother with a 1/2 Nigerian daughter who is not very dark and who many think is Polynesian because of the way she looks. My grandson’s father is Mexican and Spanish. My grandson also is part Nigerian, Swiss German (from me), a little of other European, and Navaho. He has straight black hair, light skin, and obsidian eyes. When people ask what he is and he answers, they often think he is lying. I did not grow up in poverty. My daughter is educated. She has a Masters Degree in Nursing and I have a Ph.D. Nevertheless, she has experienced discrimination and people have made comments to me such as, “Your daughter is really doing well for a Black girl”. Seriously!! In this country both class and race matter and get intertwined in all sorts of complex ways. No one says to an educated white woman with a good job, “You are really doing well for a white girl.”

Feminism and Religion

cynthia garrity bond Recently FAR contributor Sara Frykenberg posted an article to Facebook that caused me to think again about the now-famous essay by Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” Gina Crosley-Corcoran does an excellent job of including issues of class, meaning poverty, into the discourse about race and privilege using the theory of intersectionality. If I am honest, the tensions between race and poverty have made the owning my white privilege challenging.

Like Crosley-Corcoran, I was raised in poverty. After my parents divorced in the early 1960s, our fall into poverty was pronounced. My mother liked to move, so much so that I attended no less than 15 different schools before high school. We lived in one house for two years without hot water. I learned early on the stigma of poverty, when even a Catholic school uniform could not…

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Slow and Steady Wins Big on a Cocoa Farm in Costa Rica

July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This illustrates how it is possible to farm profitably and sustain the environment including wildlife.

Religion, Politics, and the RNC: Separation of Church and State Anyone? by Marie Cartier

July 23, 2016July 23, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This blog post provides a number of well thought out issues and arguments to ponder regarding the upcoming election. Somehow a civil discourse needs to occur but sadly seems less and less likely.

Feminism and Religion

When you read this Feminism and Religion community, we will have just finished the televised portion of the Republican National Convention (RNC), which as I write this Wednesday, July 20 has announced that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for president of the United States.

Last night the first night of the RNC we witnessed the emerging platform of the party going far to the right.

From the New York Times:

Republicans moved on Tuesday toward adopting a staunchly conservative platform that takes a strict, traditionalist view of the family and child rearing, bars military women from combat, describes coal as a “clean” energy source and declares pornography a “public health crisis.”
The platform demands that lawmakers use religion as a guide when legislating, stipulating “that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights.”
It also encourages the teaching of the Bible in public schools because, the amendment…

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Summer Evening

July 16, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

storm clouds at sunset

rain

reflections in gold

Summer Day

July 15, 2016July 15, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / 2 Comments

sunrise over canyon wall

shimmering heat of a summer day

sun sinking behind cedars

Book Review by Mary Sharratt: ESTHER by Rebecca Kanner

July 13, 2016July 13, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

I am reblogging this because it fits with my next book project: poems from the viewpoint of the ancient mother goddess and others from the viewpoint of women in the Bible.

Feminism and Religion

esther

We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed into the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father and the celebrated chronicle of my brother.

-Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover the buried histories of women, we must act as detectives, studying the clues left from ages lost.

At its best, historical fiction can write women back into history and challenge our misconceptions about women in the past. Anita Diamant’s novel, TheRed Tent, became such an…

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Meet the Artist–the Writing Process and Poetry

July 12, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This evening I am the artist at a local Meet the Artist event in Amarillo, Texas. This event occurs bimonthly and past presenters have included musicians, photographers, and painters. While I sing and take photos, my presentation will include reading poems from my book, “On the Rim of Wonder” and new, unpublished poems and talking about the writing process. While I honestly thought few would be interested in the latter, several people have asked me specifically to discuss this.

Although I consider myself a writer, I do not sit down on schedule and write every day like many writers. Inspiration, thoughts, come to me sporadically. I write creatively exactly like I used to write college papers, magazine articles, etc.; I look like I am doing nothing, but in reality, all these ideas run through my head and finally gel. Then I sit down and write it all at once.

The following is one of the poems from my book which I plan to read this evening:

Aging

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas

Custom says, “Age gracefully.”

Are they crazy, dumb.

Who wants to look

old

wrinkled

grey?

They lie.

All of them.

Who wants a broken mind

confused

unfocused

lost?

Shoot me!

Burn my bones.

Scatter them

in the desert sands

to feed

desert willow where

rattlesnakes lie

searching for shade.

Dealing with Despair by Carol P. Christ

July 11, 2016July 11, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This blog post also notes that cities and small towns use traffic tickets for minor violations to fund their governments. Immediately, I thought of a tiny town on the highway from Amarillo to Dallas that rakes in huge amounts of money this way. Then this morning I just read of another incident where police killed a black man who, instead of having a gun as police claimed, had his hands up in the air–from a surveillance camera nearby. The police officers in question had on body cameras–that footage has not yet been released. I am quite sure we will hear more about that one even if it has not been on the national news yet.

Feminism and Religion

Philando Castile, school cafeteria worker, killed driving while black

In a state of shock after the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, I turned to my Facebook feed, looking for community in my grief and hoping to make sense of what had happened. The statement, “He would not have been shot if he had been white,” referring to Philando Castile, appeared several times. The first time I saw it, I responded, “He would not even have been stopped if he had been white.” Think about it if you are white: how many times have you been pulled over by the police?

I can answer that question: in the United States, only once, and that was because I made a second illegal U-turn at the same stop-lighted intersection as a teenager. The policeman issued me two tickets, stating that he had been willing to let the first offence go…

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Ethiopian Journey, Dubai

July 3, 2016 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

If you have a long enough layover in Dubai, they put you up in their Emirates hotel and feed you in the cafeteria free. The hotel is nice, the food excellent–quite a nice perk. From the hotel it is easy to walk to several places as well as take a van tour around the city. We did both.

The view from my room. The pool has a swim up bar but it is not open during Ramadan which was occurring two years ago when we were there. Alcohol is available in some restaurants and bars but you must imbibe inside.

One of the first places we visited on the tour was this mosque, designed to look like the famous mosque in Istanbul. The following photos are of typical houses near the mosque.

Then we arrived at the beachfront of the Persian Gulf. The water is warm, like lukewarm soup. In the background two of the most expensive hotels in the world tower above the water.

The street goes along the waterfront with luxury hotels on the left. Many of these areas are fill–manmade peninsulas.

You can visit the sister hotel in the Bahamas.

Because of the fill, the fake peninsulas, it is easy to get a bit disoriented. Plus during the summer there is so much haze, it is rather difficult to determine directions.

The tallest building in the world.

After visiting several smaller shopping areas, we arrived here, the famous Dubai mall. This is the largest aquarium in a mall in the world. Here you see people from everywhere in the world dressed in every way imaginable.

A children’s store across from the aquarium contained this lollipop tree with giant lollipops.

In spite of high heat–it was 108 when we arrived–no wind and high humidity (yes, because on the Gulf, even though it is desert, the humidity is stifling), many people were outside awaiting the fountain show.