Nature Is Like God

Sharing Our Stories

By: W.D. Foster-Graham

Book Review Editor

NATURE IS LIKE GOD

By Alyssa and Moriah Miller

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending a Minnesota Black Authors Expo event at the Brooklyn Park Library. The energy was amazing, a great mix and interaction between authors, readers, and their children.

Among the new authors I had the honor of meeting was Alyssa Miller, whose children’s book, Nature Is Like God, is the topic of my review this month.

Co-authored by Miller and her daughter Moriah, the story embraces scriptural texts from Romans, 2 Corinthians, Colossians, and John that illustrate the majesty of the relationship between nature and God, and it is done in such a way that a small child easily grasps these concepts and truth. I must admit, so often children “get it” quicker than adults do, and they run with it.

Throughout the book and the lovely illustrations by Sara Pimental, the Millers show us the many ways we “see” God through the diverse facets of nature, and the fact that God is everywhere, ever-present, and forever. And interwoven in the illustrations you will find the words “Like God.” As adults, we can and do get caught up in our busy-ness and the cares of the world, and we take nature for granted. However, if we are intentional about taking each day to experience the wonder of nature that’s all around us, it reminds us that God is a God of abundance, how big, how all-encompassing God the Creator is. And there is such a tremendous wonder in seeing it all through the eyes of a child.

Alyssa and Moriah certainly took me back to the days when my son was a child of five and six, and those days are precious memories that touch my heart.

Nature Is Like God is available is available through Wise Ink Creative Publishing, the Minnesota Black Authors Expo, and Miller’s website www.likegodbook.com. Thank you, Alyssa and Moriah, for a beautiful and inspiring parent-child collaboration. For you readers out there, take a moment. Step outside. Be in the present moment of all that nature is and all of whom the Creator is.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has named Abdirahman Kahin, CEO & Owner of Afro Deli and Grill, as Minnesota’s Small Business Person of the Year for 2023. Kahin will compete for National Small Business Person of the Year during National Small Business Week, which is taking place the first week of May, in Washington DC.

“Minnesota is home to wonderful resilient small businesses who anchor our communities. Rising to the top this year is Afro Deli & Grill, a fast-casual restaurant founded by Abdirahman Kahin,” said SBA’s Minnesota District Director Brian McDonald. “Kahin’s unique business concept coupled with the support of the SBA and his dedication reflects great credit on his business and

Hispanics

From 5 suddenly—like that cousin with red hair who just pops up in a family tree where everyone else›s hair is brown. Eyebrows are raised until it is revealed that there was once a red-headed ancestor way, way back—a recessive inherited biological trait—human variation. Such traits like red hair, blood types, skin color are rooted in biology and our environmental adaptation. Race is not a biological fact. Also, our visible differences have absolutely NO connection to intelligence or wealth or class. The latter are functions of education, access to the means to make wealth, and the social class one into which a person is born— though they may escape birth social class through education and the accumulation of wealth. The North American system of racialization is one used to justify treating certain human beings as subhuman and labeling my ancestors (and now me) as “inferior” in order to exploit our labor, support human trafficking (e.g., the buying and selling of slaves), and to justify the genocide of a nonwhite people, as well as the occupation and appropriation of their indigenous land and strategic resources. The battle with the U.S. government for indigenous rights to land and water is ongoing, with some successes after decades of struggle and protesting (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/ politics/15-native-americantribes-to-receive-580-million-infederal-money-for-water-rightssettlement#:~:text=The%20 U.S.%20Supreme%20Court%20 ruled,any%20given%20 reservation%20has%20existed).

The U.S. racialized social system of stratification remains firmly in place today both formally and informally. Indeed, as many have observed, “Zip code may not be destiny but it operates with the strength of something like gravity. The place you live exerts a terrific pull in one direction or another” (https://www.edpost. com/stories/zip-code-may-notbe-destiny-but-its-as-hard-tofight-as-gravity ). But such social stratification is essential to ensure the perpetuation of white privilege, which was/is built upon the non-privilege of Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples

The fallacious ideology of white superiority is rooted in the presumption of white supremacy, and is part of the foundation of American democracy and its white wealth. Without such a system of so-called superior whites and so-called subordinate Blacks and Indigenous, and more recently Brown/Latinx, there would be virtually NO white wealth.

It is the labor of Black enslaved people and the theft of indigenous land and resources through genocide and/ or disingenuous treaties that have made white wealth and white privilege possible.

These acts of enslavement, human trafficking, genocide, and violated treaties are the facts the “The W.O.K.E Act” legislation in Florida and the anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) legislation in Iowa want to hide and erase.

Blanqueamiento: On Hispanics

Becoming “White” in America Hispanics are not new to racial politics. They have their own history of how Black and Indigenous people are always at the bottom of the social ladder—

Always! Though theire is a phrase “money whitens,” which means that economic success can move a person up the social ladder, regardless of their ancestry.

Whitening up or blanqueamiento has always been at the heart of the racialization system in Latin America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Blanqueamiento ) Even if born in the U.S., Hispanics/Latin Americans, have absorbed a system of racialization in which the goal is to become less Black has led to impressive growth to allow him to invest back into the local community.”

Afro Deli and Grill is a fusion restaurant that weaves together business, community, and culture that offers freshly made African, Mediterranean, and American food in a fast, fun, and friendly environment. When Abdirahman Kahin immigrated to the United States in 1996 and settled in Minnesota, he attended community college and developed the skills necessary to start his first business, a media production company. As his American dream evolved, he turned to his next venture; a unique restaurant with a new concept “healthy, fresh, assessable African food made to order at an affordable price”.

Afro Deli’s culture is rooted in the belief that good accessible or Indigenous—e.g., erase any evidence of Blackness—and become recognized as white— those who can participate in “passing.” They rely upon their light-skin color to help them navigate white America—often marrying white and changing their last names, anglicizing the pronunciation, losing their Spanish accent, not teaching their children to speak Spanish, and masking any evidence of their cultural heritage.

Blanqueamiento contrasts sharply with the onedrop (hypodescent) practice in the United States; in effect, one drop of Black blood (ancestry) relegates the person to being identified as “Black.” Such a practice enabled slaveholders who raped Black enslaved women to ensure that the children from such a violent union would always be classified as Black and enslaved, regardless of their appearance. This sexual brutalization of Black women occurred on slave ships and during slavey was considered ‘entertainment” for slaveholders. Indeed, white masters could walk into slave cabins and assert power over Black men by taking Black girls and women, considered property, to use as sexual playthings. The children that came from these encounters account for the rainbow of skin color, hair texture, and other features (now all confirmed by DNA testing) observable in the Black population today. No amount of legislation will be able to erase this fact.

Historically, countries like Venezuela (Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Identity in Venezuela: https://utpress. utexas.edu/9780292790803) and Argentina (The Idea of