Author name: Brian Allain

How can we talk about race without the defensiveness, reflexivity, and scapegoating?

Mark Feldmeir /

Baltimore, Ferguson, Charlottesville, Charleston. Trevon, Tamir, Sandra, Philando, and Freddie. Kaepernick, Serena, Barkley, and Lebron. White supremacy, white privilege, white fragility, and woke. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” “I can’t breathe.” Black Lives Matter. These are just some of the people, places, controversies, and catchphrases that have come to define the complexities of today’s conversation about […]

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Identity Politics

Robin DiAngelo /

All progress we have made in the realm of civil rights has been accomplished through identity politics: women’s suffrage, the American with Disabilities Act, Title 9, federal recognition of same-sex marriage. A key issue in the 2016 presidential election was the white working class. These are all manifestations of identity politics. Take women’s suffrage. If

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If we are to survive and thrive, we must hold its divisions and contradictions with compassion, lest we lose our democracy.

Parker Palmer /

I discovered a book that helped me understand how heartbreak and depression – two of the most isolating and disabling experiences I know – can expand one’s sense of connectedness and evoke the heart’s capacity to employ tension in the service of life. Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Shenk, is a probling examination of our sixteenth

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Until We Weep

Shannon CrossBear /

by Shannon CrossBear Let us weep For what has been done to the children, to the mothers, to the fathers, to the sons and daughters Over generations, across continents and oceans in the name of the Doctrine of Discovery Let us weep And with those tears nurture right relationship Remembering what it means to be

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