Tag: anti-racism

Fix the Creative Writing Workshop

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on May 15, 2025. Posted in General, Racism to Reconciliation, Writing. 2 Comments on Fix the Creative Writing Workshop

Are you a writer? In the course of “learning to write,” have you participated in a writing workshop? How did it go? Was it fun? Did it make the piece you were workshopping better? Did you learn something profound that stuck with you? Or were the teachings smothered by the acidic emotions of being “critiqued” by those who...

Safe Space, An Error

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on November 18, 2022. Posted in Featured, General, Racism to Reconciliation. 6 Comments on Safe Space, An Error

We sat around the table at Caritas Village. The time was the early 2010s, the place Memphis. We were in the back room behind the grey folding partition conducting our Memphis School for Servant Leadership Board meeting. We were probably eating chips or brownies or other snacks Board members brought for meetings. As the Board chair reviewed the...

How to Fail at the Race Talk

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on August 2, 2016. Posted in Featured, General, GOD, HOMELESSNESS, LOVE, Racism to Reconciliation. 4 Comments on How to Fail at the Race Talk

I failed at the conference for racial justice this weekend. I gave racially tinged advice to a perfectly innocent question that had no race element to it. I mistook one African-American woman with glasses and short hair for a different African-American woman with glasses and short hair, because all African-Americans look alike to us white...

An Outside Plant

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on April 27, 2016. Posted in Racism to Reconciliation. 2 Comments on An Outside Plant

He had one plant, small. I had three hanging baskets and two big ferns, fat. He’d been there when I arrived, he and his wife wandering among the plants. It was mid-day Wednesday, no one else at the nursery. A young, spring day. The swarms of eager Memphians hadn’t yet descended on the unsuspecting begonias and geraniums. No one...

“Yes, I Mind!”

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on August 1, 2015. Posted in Racism to Reconciliation. 4 Comments on “Yes, I Mind!”

So, here’s a story, one of my favorite from my young adult years. My sister went to visit her husband’s constitutional law class. The class is full of first year law students at a prestigious law school. Big bombastic law professor (this is the way I remember it.) Anyway, the professor leads the class in a call-and-response. He says, “When...

What Can I Do—the Bree Model

Written by Ellen Morris Prewitt on July 5, 2015. Posted in GOD, Racism to Reconciliation. 2 Comments on What Can I Do—the Bree Model

She had a crisis of faith. But so much went before that. Her work, her reading, her awareness. Her travel, her commitment, her participation. Her use of her talent. Her love of God. In her statement following her direct nonviolent action of removing the Confederate flag from where it flew on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol, Ms....