Arbitrary Marks

No time for a more substantial post tonight, but here’s a link to some comments I made over at Lo-Fi Tribe on the topic of marriage. The original question was whether (in the context of the California gay marriage ruling), race and sexual orientation ought to be equated. So we started talking a bit about that, and Shawn made this comment: “And yes, many heterosexual couples read [legalizing gay marriage] as a reduction of their bond to the banal.” Um, ouch.

In the last post, I said I was "aghast" that the white Democrats used self-defense as justification for their actions against black voters. According to Albert Bandura, however, I shouldn’t be surprised–that’s the way most inhumanities are perpetrated. In his article about just this phenomenon, moral disengagement in perpetrating inhumanities, Bandura uses psychological [...]

Below is a summary of the events in Mississippi and Louisiana from 1874 to 1876 that lead to Adelbert Ames giving up the governorship and the Republican party losing the south. After reading this timeline in Lemann’s book, which is fleshed out considerably with narratives of the confrontations, I was aghast. Whites in the South [...]

At lunch break today I finished Redemption by Nicholas Lemann. I closed the book and sat in silence for a few minutes. Along with A Briefer History of Time, this narrative has been slowly changing the way I view my world, and the closing chapter was a stunner.
What I’d like to do in [...]

We knew that North Saint Louis isn’t the safest neighborhood, but my partner had been there a few years before (with one of the friends, L, who joined us), and we’ve heard if you stick to the restaurant and daylight hours, you’ll be okay.

Summarizing or responding critically to Anthony Pinn’s Varieties of African-American Religious Experience is a difficult task.  Pinn covers the religions traditions of Vodou, Yoruba/ Santeria, the Nation of Islam and humanism in less than 200 pages.  His book spans centuries of history and travels across large stretches of geography.
I’ll restrict my critical comments to his final [...]