Graham’s legacy is not as a maverick or a trailblazer. It is the legacy of a man who used Jesus as a tool to placate the masses so that the status quo of conservative white America could remain firmly in place. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Graham may have wanted integration, but instead, he promoted gradualism and provided absolution for racists hiding behind a Christianity attuned not only to Jesus but also focused on regulating behavior and black bodies. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Graham promoted a white evangelical respectability that wanted to ‘put the brakes’ on the civil rights movement, and never really accepted women as equal to men. He may have been the country’s greatest evangelist, but he was also an apologist for the racist and sexist beliefs pervasive among white evangelical men in 20th-century America. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces. Anthea Butler Read Quote
In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin. Anthea Butler Read Quote
The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are the worst kind of crises for people like Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen, who purvey their own versions of the prosperity gospel. This is a belief that says if you think positively and make affirmations, God will reward you with financial success and good health. Anthea Butler Read Quote
When the good Christians of America are some of its biggest racists, one has to consider our moral responsibility to call out those who clearly are not for human flourishing, no matter what ethnicity a person is. Where are you on that scale? I know where I am. Anthea Butler Read Quote
Judge Aquilina did what Michigan State University officials, USA Gymnastics, and the Karoyli ranch officials did not: Immediately believed the women who had been abused, validated their lives, and ended their perpetrator’s access to them and other victims. Anthea Butler Read Quote
If you’re a black woman at an Ivy League school, there is no free speech for me because they’re already pissed that I’m there. Anthea Butler Read Quote
