The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is internally conflicted over gay rights and Proposition 8 according to the Empowering Spirits Foundation. Apparently the national SCLC leadership threatened to remove the Los Angeles chapter’s president (Rev. Eric P. Lee) because of his outspoken support of gay marriage. My first response was of course, SCLC…Southern…Christian. What should we expect? But it’s disheartening nonetheless. The tension between “blacks and gays” (a linguistic construction that perpetuates the invisibility of gay blacks, not to mention the complete absence of the L, B, and T part of GLBT or of any other non-white queer in this struggle) has been part of theRead More →

Recently I’ve been working a lot with the YWCA Dialogue on Race again. The dialogue process is invaluable, important, necessary, and problematic. On Intersectionality First off, the conversations about race with sympathetic people of all races in Louisiana are generally flat because they don’t broach essentialism, intersectionality, or identity politics. While racism in Louisiana feels much more entrenched and deep-seated than in some other places, the general understanding of racism here lacks recognition of crosscurrents and interactions. Of course, some might say, “what is there to understand?…racism is racism. The people who are suffering under the burden of racism already understand. They’re oppressed. They liveRead More →

To revamp this site, I read a lot about blogging, and learned there are now rules about how to do it. Apparently, I violate many blogging conventions. These rules are funny considering I didn’t even know what a blog was when I started. It just seemed like something enjoyable to do. Of course, as a rhetorician, I know the most important rule is audience-centeredness, but I just defined my audience as myself, the occasional friend or student, and perhaps whoever else stumbled onto my site. The internet was generally empty at the time, and I decided early on that my blog would avoid a heavyRead More →