Maybe it's Finals, maybe it's the Warriors poised on the brink of elimination from the NBA Playoffs, maybe it's just the change in the weather. Whatever it is, there is a weird feeling in the air today. The loud, obnoxious middle-schoolers on BART were louder, the homeless people talking to themselves are angrier, the drivers are more aggressive, and I feel my own hackles up higher than usual, my defenses thinner, my frustrations closer to the surface. It's been cloudy and windy all day, a gray formless layer of uncertain height and a cool wet wind off the Bay. I biked to the Downtown branch of the Berkeley Library and had to BART home after checking out too many books. Okay, time to face up to my last obligation to Hungarian: the dreaded final exam. Then I'll take my five academic credits and skedaddle, thank you very much.
This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...
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