Three sessions of facilitated discussions on the root causes of racism will begin Monday at 7 p.m., hosted online by Metropolitan Community Church of the Quad Cities. Our goal is to guide groups to intertwine faith and justice for sustainable long-term collective action and accountability. We will be meeting at 7 pm. Each session is 90 minutes long. The first is focused on relationship building and identity exploration. We ask questions about the parts of our identity that are most salient to us, the experiences that inform how we think about the world and our relationship with privilege and... Read More

MACOMB/MOLINE, IL — The Initiative for Social Justice Pedagogies at Western Illinois University, led by English Professor Rebekah Buchanan and Education Professor James La Prad, will again host the virtual Anti-Racist Inquiry Series – Looking Inward: Educators Examining Race, via Zoom, beginning Thursday, Feb. 11. The series debuted during the Fall 2020 semester. According to Buchanan and La Prad, the series has been created in a way for faculty,* regardless of background and training in anti-racism, to gain additional insight and training from participation. “Individual and systemic... Read More

It’s ironic that most of the commercials throughout Gillette’s history have involved a man literally looking at himself in the mirror, since its latest and most controversial ad does so metaphorically in a way far more powerful than the previous banal stock image to shill razors. I’m sure most of you have heard about it by now, and a large percentage of you have seen it. (If you haven’t, you can watch it here.) In the ad, various scenarios of traditional rites of masculine passage and behavior play out, juxtaposed with the questioning of those tropes in today’s world. We see a boy being... Read More