Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Anthea Butler - Page 2

Despite a rich history of black Americans involved in the Catholic Church, invisibility is a big problem for black Catholics in America.

Spatial racism, the erasure of black faces in a predominantly white city, is in full effect in both Crown Heights and Center City Philadelphia. This racism demands that bodies that don't conform to a mandated 'white' status quo can be redlined out of a space.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen are mirrors of each other. Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they lack a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent.

As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history. Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts.

Black women care deeply about civic engagement, democracy, education, children, and justice.

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.

For black Catholics, the papal visit is a time of anticipation but also a time of reflection on their difficult - but important - place within the Catholic Church in America.

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.

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.

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.

God ain't good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us.

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.

The American Catholic Church made statements on racism as far back as the 1940s and '50s. 'Colored' Catholic girls could not live in the dorms at Catholic University - the bishops' university - up into the 1940s.

Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.

As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain't my god.

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.

Graham functioned as a megaphone for conservative biblical ideas that dovetailed with conservative politics, including family, sexual morality, and adherence to laws. He was not only an evangelist, he was also an enforcer: enforcing conservative white Christian social beliefs and evangelical ethical claims as 'America's Pastor.'

What often happens in a court of law is that, if victims do get their day in court, they are on trial as much as the perpetrators.

Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.

The Charleston shooting is a result of an ingrained culture of racism and a history of terrorism in America. It should be covered as such.

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.

While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.

While it is important that black women begin to receive the accolades and assistance they are due from the Democratic Party, they cannot be expected to continue to save white people from the poor choices they make - based not on moral values but party affiliation.

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.

Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.

My memories of Vatican II center on white parishioners turning away from me when I went to shake their hands at Mass during the sign of peace.

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.

I went to Catholic school and experienced racism firsthand from nuns and priests.