Category: Inclusion

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a…

By now many in the LGBTQ community have heard of the news about the cop beat down of Duanna Johnson in a Memphis jailhouse that was captured on a surveillance video. Those of us especially of African descent, who don’t know or haven’t seen a photo of Johnson, might pick up on a cultural marker…

In Robinson’s new book, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God, he answers the question. BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University,…

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a…

Gay white Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious “Man in a Polyester Suit” maintains the stereotypical convention of black male sexuality as a monstrous phallus that is dangerous, out of control and animalistic. The gay white male photographer’s central focus on a black uncircumcised penis protruding from an unzipped pair of polyester pants reasserts the mythology of…

I have learned as both a pastor and also as a member belonging to several minority groups – African American, women and lesbian – that a popular opinion on an issue does not always reflect the right choice. Too often the right choice and the moral high ground on an issue derive from a small…

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Valaida Snow came from a family of musicians and was famous for playing the trumpet. Named “Little Louis” after Louis Armstrong (who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, aside from himself, of course) Snow played concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and China. On a return trip to Denmark…

Obama knows the political power the black bible-thumping church plays in every major election, which is why he has gotten into this triangulation with LGBTQ voters and black Christian conservatives. H. Alexander Robinson, CEO of National Black Justice Coalition, said that Obama is “too inexperienced at playing at his level. He’s stubborn and he refuses…

The current issue is always free to everyone Many people working for justice today stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King Jr., but I believe King’s vision of justice is often gravely limited and misunderstood. Too many people thought then, and continue to think, that King’s statements regarding justice were only about race and…

According to the American Cancer Society, every three minutes, a woman in the U.S is diagnosed with breast cancer. It is the most common cancer among women, and about 178,480 women will have been found to have invasive breast cancer in 2007. Because of the disparity in health care, African American women are more likely…