Two news sources we read a lot here are the Indian Country Today media network and HealingMNStories (a local blog). These are definitely worth adding to your news reader as you seek to listen carefully to issues of race and religion in various contexts.

Here is the powerful article Robin DiAngelo has written that is having such a profound impact in discussions of anti-racism work — particularly in predominately white communities. Identifying “white fragility” as a key dynamic to interrupt and engage, she elucidates the challenges white people need to meet to do this work in both transformative and sustainable ways:

For instance:

Beyoncé released a very powerful music video a couple of weeks ago, Formation:

https://vimeo.com/154783794

There has been much fascinating criticism, such as this piece in RacismReview, this piece in Salon, and this blog post by Jouelzy. The video is provoking a lot of useful engagement with the very diverse ways meaning gets made in the US these days. Even a Jesuit weighed in!

This weekend SNL did a funny take on the reception of the video in certain parts of the white community:

And just because it’s beautiful, here’s a documentary about Beyoncé’s singing of Take My Hand, Precious Lord at the 2015 grammys:

Marlon James, award-winning author and professor here in town at Macalester College, did this very short video for The Guardian, asking the question “are you ‘non’ or ‘anti'”?

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has a compelling and thoughtful piece in the NYTimes  reflecting upon the challenges within Black America as the huge inequality gap which affects all of the US is even more present within Black communities. Excerpts follow (but read the whole thing!):

The class divide is, in my opinion, one of the most important and overlooked factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students. I hear about it from my students at Harvard, about the pressure they feel to rise, yes, but also the necessity to then look back to lift others.

I asked Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a senior, what was behind the racial unrest on campus. Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence is co-founder of “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a multiplatform campaign that gives voice to students who often go unheard and that brought the concept of micro-aggressions into the light. She described the motivation as “our sense of responsibility to the black communities who do not have access to the universities we attend.” The goal: “to call out the ways our own institutions participate in and perpetuate structures of racism that affect the black communities we represent through our presence at places like Harvard.”

That is, the college campus is a microcosm of practices at work in the larger society, something of a laboratory in which America’s racial experiment might be altered.

Unlike the way they are framed in so many op-eds, modern-day activists, Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence says, are anything but “a bunch of oversensitive, privileged and coddled black college students complaining and whining that they don’t feel safe because of building names and house master titles.”

…

The nation’s African-American students are searching profoundly and visibly for a definitive end to racial injustice.

…

Change, even at the symbolic level, is difficult, of course, and it remains to be seen what this current wave of protests will accomplish. Will the fight against police brutality, symbols of the Confederacy and society’s plethora of micro-aggressions become the basis of a broader movement for the improvement of underfunded public school education, for the right to a job with decent wages, and for the end of residential segregation that relegates the poor to neighborhoods with murder rates as alarming as those on the South Side of Chicago?

What is certain is that the outrage that led to Black Lives Matter and its spinoffs will be with us for years to come unless these legacies of slavery and Jim Crow become remnants of a racist past.

Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and Jamila Woods’ latest song/rap is “White Privilege II” — a powerful rap on current issues in collaboration with a  number of anti-racism organizations.

Update: As the song rolls out, so does the discussion. Here’s an interview led by Jay Smooth with the artists’ collaborative who created the song:

And here’s another discussion with Sway’s Universe and the artists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M74RrAKuZjo

You can find the lyrics to the song online.

Here’s a powerful mashup of popular discourse about Muslims, with actual footage of Muslims going about daily life.

https://www.facebook.com/unityproductionsfoundation/videos/10153270533416631/?theater

Traci Blackmon, acting executive minister of UCC Justice and Witness Ministries, noted civil rights leader, gifted preacher, pastor and teacher, delivers an extremely powerful message in this call for justice for all the children of God:

Another meditation on white privilege, this time through a contemplative lens.

Here’s a useful little piece looking at the different language news media use to cover black protests vs. white game day chaos.