Episode 34 - Black and White: Racism in America

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so i want you to try to imagine something imagine you're 24 years old single mother four kids like this week lisa was out of town and i had our two little girls and i could barely function the house is a mess just trying to get work done my life is a mess from a week of being a single dad i don't know how single parents do it right okay so you're a parent four kids uh you don't have money you don't have very much money and you're living in public housing all of your energy is going to just making sure your kids are okay that you have food on the table and thankfully the government is helping you do that a little bit getting food stamps et cetera this sort of existence is hard for me to imagine but along with countless americans a woman named irma face stewart lived in hearn texas november 2000 and this was her reality so try to stay in her shoes for a moment here try to imagine a typical day trying to provide for your family trying to keep the chaos at bay then suddenly one day the police show up and arrest you and you're asking why what did i do you haven't done anything but you've been accused by a confidential informant of a drug crime can you imagine how that would feel first of all you're in the middle of trying to take care of your four kids and now another thing you're being arrested for something you haven't done she gets taken to jail she of course can't afford an attorney so they appoint one of the people who are overloaded by the system that have no way of giving an adequate defense for such a thing to her her bail is set at seventy thousand dollars of course she doesn't have seventy thousand dollars no one in her family none of her friends have seventy thousand dollars the average person in her in texas makes twenty thousand dollars a year so she can't get out she's stuck she's got her kids out in the world without her single mother what does she do well her court-appointed lawyer says she should plead out and plead guilty and she says i'm not guilty am i going to plead guilty that'll make me a felon a drug felon he says well if you don't plead guilty you could get up to 99 years in prison 5 to 99 years in prison she doesn't want to plead guilty she waits for weeks waiting in a jail cell away from her kids and finally decides i i can't stay away from my kids and i can't risk losing my whole life the system's obviously not going to fight for me the system's obviously not going to show that i'm innocent i guess i'd rather be a felon and get back to my kids than continue to be away from them so after a month in jail a month in jail away from your kids as a single parent i can't can you imagine this having to plead guilty having to lie just so you can be with your kids you get 10 years of probation 1800 fine which for her is extravagant amount of money at least she gets to go home and by the way she's not alone in this there was a whole sweep and what they found out later was that this confidential informant that had been responsible for the police rounding up all of these people who by the way all were african-american just like irma everybody but one but they found out the informant was lying so there were all these people that were unjustly accused and arrested and jailed for something they didn't do could you imagine this sort of thing happening let's say at harvard it's a bunch of white faculty members having this happen to them you think we may have heard of that story on the news anyway out of a necessity to get back to her kids after a month in jail irma pleads guilty so now she's considered a convicted felon which in this country has some pretty dire consequences can't vote you can't get food stamps anymore she can't live where she was living so now she's homeless now she's a single mother of four without a home and without food so she can't take care of her kids anymore the government takes away her kids this is not a fathomable experience to me i can't know what that's like because that's one thing if that was an isolated experience that's just one person who had a really bad experience but stories like this are all together too common and they're piled generations high and they are not simply isolated sad stories but they are connected to a very large deep fabric that is the united states of america today on the liturgist podcast black and white i'm michael gunger this is science mike welcome everybody today on the liturgist podcast our conversation is with jason petty aka propaganda the hip-hop and spoken word artist and then we also have our friend william matthews who you may have heard on bethel music and he's got a record of his own coming out soon but this conversation is fire absolutely one of the best we've ever had on the podcast and our concern is that we jump right into the deep end of the pool so we hope those who feel a little lost or maybe even defensive at some of these ideas will not leave the conversation because while this is a tough topic to wrap your head and heart around it's very important to try before we jump into the conversation though a quick word as to why we do think it's really important especially if you're white mike and i both grew up in environments that you could call white middle class my dad was puerto rican and while that had made things difficult for him and his family at certain times of his life a turkish doctor had married his mom and adopted him that's where our name gunger comes from and he was afforded some privilege he got lucky and growing up our family wasn't rich but we always had enough i didn't have to worry about things like the police raiding my house to search for drugs or about making sure i didn't get shot walking down the wrong street in my town at the wrong time and sure i knew that other people didn't have it so nice the safety the things that i took for granted but i tried to be grateful for my blessings you know but what i didn't understand were the systems at play that allowed me to have the life that i had my neighborhood my school my church it was all product of a system riding my bike around town without a care in the world while other people in my state lived under a constant fear for their physical safety because of the color of their skin the color of their skin i mean i would have thought come on you know who really harms people because of the color of their skin crazy fringe lunatic people that's what i would have thought you know i didn't know anybody who would call a black person the n-word for example that would have been very socially unacceptable in my world my world was a color-blind world it was those sorts of people who would use racial slurs that were the racists not me those were the people causing harm to the people of color not me color didn't matter to me people were people what i didn't realize is that this attitude of colorblindness is the very attitude that systemic racism can thrive on and it's often well intentioned but it's self-admittedly blind and it's dangerous and it can be hard to hear this as a white person as a person who has been so often picked first without realizing it because what i've been learning is that just because you may have black friends and you don't use racial slurs or whatever you think makes you enlightened and post-racial that doesn't mean you're not complicit in a system that is destroying people's lives because of where they're from or the color of their skin the united states of america was built on genocide racism slavery it's in our foundation it's in the very fabric of our society so for those of us who have most benefited from systems of privilege and supremacy it is our moral responsibility to try to see things a little bit more clearly to listen to try to understand how our lives are part of a system and connected to others lives to see that the same systematic hand that gave me such a lovely white picket fence childhood is the same hand that took away hermaphae stewart's kids so ladies and gentlemen i do hope that you listen to this episode with an open mind and an open heart so that rather than embrace blindness we would see and feel and learn to love we got prop and william matthews in the house propaganda the how do you describe your music is it hip-hop that's hip-hop and poetry yeah poetry and then william matthews says he likes to describe himself as a christian musician i do christian music what michael and lisa governor used to do that's what he always says to people yeah that's my favorite there it is you're just going to go right right to there so we were having a conversation the other night with these guys and it was getting fiery and often times when we're anywhere near a microphone and it's getting firey just like can everyone shut up for a second can we get to the microphone real quick all right so the direction of this conversation could go any number of ways yeah it is super tuesday it's super tuesday let's talk about what's happening that will get us fired up and start going or should we not is this renekal political i don't know i'm too despondent yeah you deleted that tweet i know good for you it made my tweet look stupid wait because did you what tweet did you delete i said i'm waffling between despondency and indignation and then i quoted the tweet and said sorry for bumming yourself i just made you look stupid so you made me look stupid like i never consider the i really get your tweet response though i want to be really clear i don't think it's like out of bounds political to say donald trump is a danger to the united states that must be stopped at all cost i think that's just common sense i would agree with that say word you know here's the thing speaking from a minority experience and i say minority say in a person of color specifically in america and even more specifically the black experience but politics it can't be compartmentalized you know you can't say that yeah politics is a different conversation than family and church and music that's it's the same conversation that's just the nature of our experience in this country you can you can't it's fair to separate them i've been learning that the ability to not talk politics is an embodiment of what someone called privilege what i tend to call a little harsher label white supremacy yeah and what politics is really talking about how you arrange bodies and spaces that's what politics is and yeah to say i don't want to talk about politics it means you don't have to worry about the spaces for your body yeah wow i mean facts in any entrance into black american and i'm and i'm being specific about that like the black american experience there's no time in our country where politics has not grossly shaped and informed it you know what i'm saying whether it's the shape from negro spirituals which are because of slavery you know what i'm saying so like um rock and roll and ray charles and the chitlin circuit was because we weren't allowed in you know white clubs so it's like there's nothing you know funk and soul and marvin gaye singing mercy me he's talking about war you know what i'm saying like there's no as no part of our experience that hasn't been shaped by the war on drugs and the crack attack and it's it's this is our experience redlining sharecropping jim crow there's no part of the black american experience that's not intimately tied to politics we were talking on the sidewalk earlier about oh it's so strange i feel like i live in some kind of strange bubble because i don't really know anybody that loves trump yeah everybody i know hates trump i don't know hardly anybody that loves hillary i know people that are fine with hillary i know a few people love hillary i just think it's fascinating like what we say we're talking on sidewalk i've never seen and i'm coming from like an armchair like sociologist like i got my masters in social science and education so i'm coming from that from like a historical perspective and i can't think of an election offhand where the two nominees were hated so much yeah and yet are winning like i just i've ne i i think this is a super fascinating time to think of it in those terms like who's more polarizing like i don't know how do you see this from a socio sociological perspective how have we arrived at this tinder box where it's just so great like today donald trump the secret service mike was just telling us removes a group of black people they weren't even necessarily protesters do we know if they're protesters yet they were silently waiting for the event to start they had no signage on them they were just in the audience and because of that trump assumed that trump's people assumed they were protesters who would disrupt the event and the secret service removed them wow yeah that's dangerous why are we here that's real dangerous it's dangerous how are we here right now what is well i think the whole racial conversation is sort of been reset like it feels like everything's come to the surface since obama got elected all the sentiments and feelings on you know the different whatever side you quote-unquote column and it feels like we're kind of in a racial reset so to speak and i don't know if that's good or bad as much as it is and people that felt pent up are expressing feelings good or bad and everything's like a black lives matter rises and then we see you know started with obama being elected these militia groups start rising these white voices that feel like something's being taken from them you know and then we're seeing that culminate into a trump type of a candidate and so i think it's like we're kind of resetting and everything's at the surface and it's all a tinderbox like you described so i don't want to i don't want to center a white narrative here but i think if you're going to talk about racism in america you really have to talk about the white side of that issue there's a priest and a theologian that whose work i follow really closely named roger greer he told me once that racism is a white problem which is something that had never been elucidated so clearly before but it's not like black americans are choosing to live in a racist system they're not making choices that perpetuate that it's a white problem so what you have is in post-war america like after world war ii there was this radical over application or disproportionate allocation of the funding of the gi bill and other post world war ii rebuilding efforts that centered on white soldiers and white communities so it took you already had this disparity between whites and blacks in america but really low-income whites weren't in that dramatically different station than black americans but then you infuse all this post-war capital into white societies and you start having this flight from urban centers and the suburban nation of america and then you got to the situation of a segregated america the separate but equal america that fueled that original globe-changing civil rights movement and there was this period of white progress on issues of race but the response instead of fully adjusting for these enduring economic disparities was instead to roughly integrate schools but still associating school funding with property taxes which is a form of economic segregation and violence and then you have an intentional effort to create a post-racial america by telling school children white and black school children a narrative in which no we're all equal and we all get along now and so then you have this generation of people all over the country who believe they exist in a post-racial society white kids bought the story because white kids in pool districts that had enough property tax for a night school all their black friends were affluent so they knew affluent black children who reinforced their idea that they lived in a post-racial america and that's where you have that's what happened during the 70s 80s and 90s right so you what happened there is everyone saw themselves or most people saw themselves in a post-racial society white people and it became very taboo in white society even in the south to say overtly racial things to use racial slurs which represented some form of progress then we get to today and a couple things are happening one a continually soft economy that's disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest americans has created a sense of unease and panic among low income and middle income white people so their their station is legitimately getting worse and for example the data would tell us the only population group in america who is experiencing a decline in life expectancy is low-income whites right so there's a real problem there but so they're panicked and what happens in response well at the same time you're seeing the whirlwind be reaped in terms of long-standing racist policies in america especially in terms of incarceration drug crime police brutality with black america yep and so you have this dissolving of the post-racial facade and so people entrench in one of two ways one is they become fragile with white fragility white fragility is what happens on a white person who believes themselves to be basically good is confronted by the idea that they are part of supremacist systems and it frightens them and it either paralyzes them or puts them in a state of denial or some demagogue comes along and tells them the reason your factory jobs are gone is because of these mexicans and these angry black people and so you have this legitimate angry response in the form of movements like black lives matter that become a way to demonize a good movement with people who are afraid and drive this wedge into the country and that's the cauldron and the tempest we're sitting in okay let me let me pause this for a second when propaganda tweets out that okay i did the liturgist podcast so for you guys that are coming into this i just want to put this on record that's the most stay woke white boy i've [Music] [Music] he talked about fragility [Music] treat us like citizens and we write to encourage exodus like yes we are still slaves like every time you make it rain ain't giggle you put yourself on option blocks and we write to give you warm words for cold nights to outright outright shut live met someone so woke up anyway i would say this so it's that same group of people right i'ma take you back a a century earlier that same group of people that received this money from a gi bill two generations later is looking at a young black man who's complaining about welfare and wanting help from the government and it's saying you work hard and you get what you got to get you don't need no government handouts you know you guys are just all so lazy looking for a handout time out time out you know how you got to the suburbs it was the gi bill it's a government hangout and i'm gonna take them a step further and say how y'all had the family farm was a homestead act so so this is you know when we bought the louisiana purchase and we needed people to fill that place the government was handing out monies for families to move there and if you don't know how to farm no problem we will pay for you to learn how to farm that's a government program you know what i'm saying so so when you tell me right that my family has not attained wealth and i'm just looking for the government to help me out i'm like a timeout young buck that's exactly how you developed wealth was the gov it just happened two centuries ago so you looking at me now right so when i say yeah you're a product of privilege there's things that you inherited you think that's crazy because you're a poor white man still working for you we're still working for your job but this but this is what you don't understand though because you understand though right there was a time that your government looked at you and said i am going to help you and your family received it right and i understand why you don't understand that i have the same rights that you do yep but again let me take you even a step further past that let me tell you why you think it's crazy it's because your framers thought it was crazy right because when they wrote that constitution and they said all men were created equal you think they were talking about me they wouldn't talk no they weren't talking about us they were talking about me it took a constitutional um thing think about this it's like a constitutional amendment like they had to change the law yeah to get y'all to believe that we were human yep they did not not even rights we were humans yeah right because before that you know it was only three three four five three fifteen three right so but it took a long time let that sink in like it took a long for you to understand that i was a human yeah you know what i'm saying i'll be like let's let's be real real about that like if even when when they said okay we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men were created equal and by all men we mean white over 25 that own land and they're that are uk descendants you know what i'm saying so your irish uncle right yeah the constitution didn't apply to him you know what i'm saying so like if you let that truth set in and understand that narrative where you in in in the same way that like you you had in the 17 1800s you had like japanese people standing in front of the supreme court trying to argue that they were white so that we could own land you know what i'm saying so if this is the story for which we coming out so we're not oh so again when you stand back and you say we got this this demagoguery that's kind of happening in in our super tuesday elections now it's because like you said we're talking about a narrative that has been 300 years long when this people group had an issue we just tell them what to do and everything changes yeah everybody adjusts for this right so even his talk around political correctness and and we like him because he's not politically correct and you know what i hear i hear now people are sticking up for themselves when you make fun of them right so now you're not allowed to just so whenever so whenever somebody sticks up for themselves and says hey man you should be running around calling people faggots like this you can't talk like that fam like you know what i'm saying right oh well you know i'm not really in all this political correctness like okay i get it so you don't you don't want none of us stick up for ourselves yeah is that that's what you're saying like you said you've enjoyed this generational narrative of the system working for you and if the system stops working and if someone starts saying hey wait a minute bro like you can't treat the rest of us like this you know what i'm saying and we got it it's it's a little kid who's playing at the park and all of a sudden the he's losing his soccer game so he's going to take his ball and go home like you know what i'm saying that and i feel like that's what we're witnessing you just give me a ball back you know what i'm saying i don't want to play anymore right yeah so just you just throwing this tantrum because the game is not going your way and people are saying and calling you on it like no you're a freaking cheater you're cheating you are cheating and everybody sees it you're cheating you know what i'm saying i really honestly like to be honest i really had nothing to add to what you laid out well i i just want to add to what makes the whole conversation about pulling yourself up from the bootstraps personal responsibility so cheap to me is fast forward to today everyone claiming that argument generally are conservative christians who themselves their churches are receiving government handouts in the form of 501c3s and they're not paying their water bill and they're not you know like people are talking about christian liberties being attacked and it's going wait wait you're the ones receiving that paycheck from the government that allows your mega church to exist like so many churches were shut down if they didn't receive that money those are government handouts that's a government handout so whenever i hear churches particularly using that rhetoric that conservative christian rhetoric i go you're receiving government handouts so why are you trying to take it out of those people's hands and you're okay with it in your hands so i couldn't care less about uh politically correct but i couldn't care more about using language for people that honors their dignity as human beings absolutely so if people don't like the term politically correct that's fine with me drop the term all you want but have the decency to use language that preserves human dignity that's all we're talking about that's all we're saying a politically correct thing is just a way to move the conversation away to a buzzword away from the core thing do we care enough about people to use language that honors them and their experiences are we mature enough to honor the language people use for themselves yeah and it just to me there could not be a more sacred value it came to me as you were talking like from an academic perspective when you say racism is a white problem i i couldn't agree more specifically in america like if if we're going to talk about the dominant and subdominant like cultural motif like it just happens to fall along sort of color lines here clearly it's not the same in china you know what i'm saying all that saying is like racism again from an academic definition implies that you are in power and you have the power to enact discriminatory things towards a people group so by definition a black person can't be racist because we are not the dominant culture yeah we and we don't have the power to act discriminatory yeah you know things based on our prejudice yeah right so these three top terms are different prejudice discrimination and racism they're very different so so the term reverse racism is a joke right because it's and it's intellectually it's a misnomer right so that's not even possible now i have plenty of prejudice but so do you and so do all of us yeah all humans have all humans have prejudice i don't like rome it's prejudice i'm just i just i don't like rum maybe you haven't had good rum oh it's too sweet to me i just i like whiskey you know what i'm saying i just you're right right but in terms of race it's it's important to understand even in that dialogue that like for someone to be participate in racism we're talking about a structural problem that assumes a power that has the ability to enact law in a way of life that can control others that's racism so when i stand up and i say yeah that dude's a racist right and why i think donald trump can in his brain honestly believe when he says no i'm not a racist right he because he don't know what the word means yeah yeah like yeah and in a lot of ways you might be right definitely prejudice you know what i'm saying right but if we put you in office congratulations you've become a racist because now you have power and you're enacting those and you can enact those powers to change the rest of our lives yeah that's scary i've always i've never lived like in the south i guess i lived in the south for a little while but i mean i just never would have imagined that trump would have gotten this far like none of us did that the mount i knew i was known there like there is a group of people that is that disenfranchised with having barack obama as a president or that like i knew there are some people that were mad this many that it's like winning it's terrifying i say it's like a creed album [Laughter] right where it's like actually i got that from from derek webb he was like he goes man you know nobody likes creed but you know 20 minute albums didn't sell themselves so like same with nickelback yeah yeah so if it wouldn't have been trump it would have been someone else because uh america historically white majority that majority is declining as that majority declines the ability to enforce privilege via systemic racism be it unconscious or not declines and so it's a natural human tendency so it's not a matter of equality white people have had the ability to not only swing their arms but their arms to strike other people's faces and that be perceived as just normal and right and equal they're more equal and as that that statistical picture changes the freedom to swing one's arm and strike another's face goes away and it feels like a loss of freedom as opposed to merely living like everyone else yeah so if it wouldn't have been trump someone else would have come along as the demographic pictures of america changes to deal with white panic yeah this is a people this is a people problem not just a leadership problem this isn't like a trump problem trump's always been there he's good it's it's a cognitive thing i'm fascinated by the amount of like conservative republicans that are like incredibly well the party is really divided i mean i i will say this i was the guy eight years ago who voted for john mccain and didn't vote for barack obama i was the black man that did not vote for barack obama biggest regret in my life because i can't tell my children that right but sort of now it's public you sold millions of people i just told millions listen to this podcast wow incredible okay it's getting it's a good one so far i'm getting the millions i'm saying i spent a season my life as a republican you know a right-wing christian i bought it hook line and sinker primarily i was spent my entire twenties in uh mostly white environments and that's just what i was fed in my identity yeah social identity and that's what we believed and we voted for john mccain and sarah palin because that was god's choice and i knew people had dreams about it and people had prophetic words about it and that's what we did and uh and i did too i bought into it today what kind of church did you grow up in i grew up in a black church my dad was a pastor i come from three generations of ministry my father grandfather is a missionary which is why this ties in yeah here here's here's the narrative you learn so you become you become a christian at some point your understanding of christ and salvation moves from like that's just what grandma will do right and uncle and him because all of our uncles are deacons like somebody's a dude you know what i'm saying right somebody's a criminal somebody's a deacon that's just your family right so it moves from that and just hooping and hollering and there's and and like the past only got a third grade education so like it's not like you not you're really learning anything to being like okay wait a minute i i believe i've been regenerated i now have a desire to know the things of god so then you go off to seminary or you start reading books or you start learning of other church experiences and then you sit in like this sort of sort of white church experience and it's like which is the dominant broader church experience and it's like and you're listening and you're going this seems so much more academic right and you're like i i feel like i'm actually like learning something you would say you know i remember sitting sit in my uncle's church and he said the last 45 minutes talking about just be holy because i'm holy and he would just sing about holiness for the next 45 minutes and i'm like man like yeah what does that even mean so then you start going to these these other churches you go out to seminary and these dudes oh man they're bringing out like commentaries and lexicons and telling you about like church history and this is stuff you've never heard before right you just don't know it right but then a part of you is thinking okay i get it but i tell you what you know grandma on them they was at the homeless shelter every sunday every saturday you know what i'm saying and and you know what i'm saying and it was passing out you know we was collecting money for like you know the crisis pregnancy center my parents were feeding hundreds of people at the church that my dad had 40 person church we got a a grant and we were feeding a hundred you've seen what i'm saying in detroit michigan every week free lunches yeah so you have this this like conflict in you especially if you african americans conflict in you to where you like i feel like these people understand the bible but these people understand the world and you feel like you got to choose so since you're not hearing any other voices in your seminaries right and you're thinking okay well this is the word of god and these are like the t i i just and and grandma and m name really they really teach the scriptures and then and then this dude's gonna start saying well that's a social gospel and they don't hold on to you know the tenets of our faith and just like and then you so you just you're in this conflict and you're just like well i mean it's the scriptures and i so you don't know that there are christian thinkers that have like synthesized those you just don't know it right so if you don't know it you just black dude and every day you feel like you're losing more and more of your own identity welcome to my twenties right because you gotta let it go because this is all you know you know what i'm saying and and and you've been told because and even when you try to find you try to find books you're trying to it's like and in this part of you in the back of your head you're going there's no way there's no way god only spoke to dutch dudes german and dutch there's no way that's true right but like i just i don't i can't find any of them because none of my i'm like this professor you're like your professor is like a 30-year veteran in a phd in church history and he's just got a volume he's got a room the size of the library of congress of just writings about the gospel and and the puritans and and the in the valley of vision and you're going the whole time you're going wait why didn't they stop slavery then none of them how come none of them yeah yeah james dude's own slaves like how come you know yeah how come none of them said anything why so then but you're going but i don't know so you have a crisis of identity and it lands you voting for john john because you just you don't know like there's no challenges you don't learn of like who who we know now you don't learn of the tom skinners of the world you don't learn of the carl ellises of the world you don't learn of these men and and and women of god who've been entrenched in his dude when i learned who tom skinner was when you talk about a man who stood up who who didn't go hide from uh uh the nation of islam in the 60s didn't go hide from elijah muhammad in him now he stood across the street from the nation of islam and was like our doors are open and and and fed these muslim kids and served the black community so while there was peaceful protests happening over here with dr king and them who maybe a a mainline church or mainline christian thought may have had issues with his theology ain't nobody had any issues with tom skinner's theology right but he was engaging the nation of islam but you don't learn about that stuff so once you find out about that you're just like oh crap yeah i wasted my 20. i wasted my 20s voting for john mccain and mitt romney thinking that uh oh my god i was doing god's service you were supposed to do it because that i was only i mean i thought penal substitution was it you know i thought that was the only way of seeing the gospel so here's even pushy a little more so here's the thing which which again i had to learn retroactively which had me repenting to dead relatives like had me like seeking forgiveness for like man i wish i could i wish i could look my uncle chorus gene in the face and apologize wow because of what i thought of him right because you're talking about a generation of church leaders who weren't allowed in seminaries right so when allowed in a seminary so how how am i supposed to learn this right and you know why i didn't finish third grade because someone had to feed us right so i had to work right so that's you know what i'm saying so i was i was working and the reason i can read right when i'm looking at my uncle carson the reason he could read is the bible that's why he can read is because of the bible and if you're dealing with a room full of people who also have a third grade education you really need to sit there and talk about double lapsarianism and like parse the imparts of greek verb no i know you can't read and how do people learn if they're not reading it by song so i'm gonna stand up in front of them and i'm gonna hoop and moan you know and we're just gonna talk about being holy right so that's why when i look back at my mama winnie my great grandmother and i'm like yeah she couldn't read but i tell you what that's the most godly woman i've ever met in my life yeah right because she just sat down and she meditated slowly on holiness because that's all they talked about for 45 minutes was one verse you'd be holy because i am holy so that woman understood holiness right rather than telling you what it meant in four different languages she knew what it meant when she left the church and walked through south central l.a she knew what holiness meant you know what i'm saying and so now as african-american you gotta look back and be like yo that's why they hooped a holland all day that's why they just sang something because they didn't how was you supposed to know how was you supposed to know you about maybe you want to repent of my parents you say that for real you think i'm playing like no i have an uncle now who's like staunchly reformed he's an apologist he took over my uncle corey's jeans church and compton greater union missionary baptist church california right he took it over and at the time you know i was reading more i was learning you know i'm saying my father was my father was a black panther so like i i do you know just my whole understanding of like just what the black community was what was good for our church yada yada like although i was a christian i was much more as much more malcolm than martin you know what i'm saying so like i just want to call out for our white listeners even martin was more malcolm than white people portray himself oh yeah oh yeah very true very yeah very true so i remember when he took over that church i had no interest in going because i thought he was going to be just like my question right and we sat down one one thanksgiving and i was talking to just in all arrogance my ain't fannie mae i mean we black right so yeah i was talking to mine fannie mae about some of like martin luther's writings and he overhears me he was like you know about church father's young buck and he said it like that because he's from compton so he's like you know about the church father's young buck and i was like well wait wait what do you know about the church father she upset because i'm thinking he's just like of course gene turns out he's like a double phd in life you're upset in like like islamic thought and like christianity and just like it's just this brilliant man and i was felt terrible but it was because of this bias that i had bought into yeah because of this narrative and it's gonna be a christian yeah you gotta you gotta swallow it at least a christian american and it's it's a it's the sin of evangelicalism i think is to you probably get this a lot being black in mostly white settings they're like how can we get more black people into this understanding and this expression of who we are and what we do and you know we want a racial reconciliation and unity and you know and but no one's willing to ask our questions and then you get somebody like science michael you go we gotta stop promoting white supremacy which they hate yeah yeah and i'll get more black people here i'll tell you that right now yeah well i go to this church that's it's pretty white but they had this radical idea that they'd like to be inclusive so our pastor when she started the church asked a black friend to come be an elder in the church and to lead from the platform every week and what do you know just that radical idea of maybe starting with inclusivity and maybe not just say how do we get black people in our pews but how do we actually yeah embody diversity in leadership in the church and then the rest of the thing kind of goes a different way yep and just like what a radical idea and that's not even our church could do a much better job of tackling supremacy but just that idea of inclusivity is is radical in many churches like we just we would really like a lot of black people in the pews yeah like look because they need to hear what we have right and it's kind of a colonial idea even a lot of our our ministry focuses are very colonial and it's called kingdom i don't want to do it it's not disrespectful but i mean it's kind of the billy graham thing like the crusades and the we're gonna win souls for jesus and in these big platforms and stadiums in these ways good intentions i guess but the truth is it's not reaching everyone this is what kills me this whole thing destroys black bodies but it destroys white souls too there's nobody who truly benefits from these systems like so i think about this dutch germanic influence of evangelical thought i was a young evangelical you both had to sit through my whole story this weekend so you know that but it all centers with a hyper rational approach to faith and when you stay in hyper rationalism and then you encounter skeptics who are even more rational your faith withers and dies because your faith was rooted not in the gospel and dirt on your hands but in a set of propositional beliefs that you can defend and convince other people of and so then i have this mystical experience and i have this super ambiguous mystical approach to god that i can basically only call christian out of personal preference and then people ask me all the time why jesus why jesus why jesus and the first time that i started to have theological convictions again is when i encountered black liberation theology like when i take the dutch germanic approach to christianity then i have to apply this like esoteric label to myself and i have to go through all this liberal theology and i have to call myself a deconstructed christian but when i encounter black liberation theology where we are viewing the gospel through the freeing of the oppressed when we're reviewing the gospel as a way to transform society by lifting the poor not and not even from the outside by realizing that we too are the poor and that all of our liberation is bound together and none of us are free until we are free i stop being a wink-wink ironic christian and i just start being a christian yeah and it is such a state of spiritual poverty that because of cultural circumstances white christians don't have the resource of black liberation theology yeah yeah yeah this the specificity of the black experience uh but if you even if you pull that part from it just the idea of liberation theology essentially what it's saying is that at its core the eyes for which you look at the scriptures are shaped by your own cultural experience and that counts in your interpretation of the way you see the world right and like you were saying like this this sort of dutch germanic one comes from a a cultural narrative that says that it's actually possible to not include that in your understanding of scripture and so so for someone to say you know forget culture culture's relative you need to think of it like this is a cultural thought like that do you think that's possible it's cultural right i mean what liberation theology is basically saying it's really just being honest is like no you're you're you are actually using your cultural lens and so are we we just count it right so when i would say this when there is a diversity of thought within what for lack of better term the canon of like orthodox or or accepted theology then that gap that you had or you had or i had in my in our appreciation of of the beauty of of of what we know to be the gospel we would miss it or we wouldn't we would miss that gap perfect example is in almost going back to your your testimony your your story if you will when you when you were saying like i don't know if i can if i can jive with a god that would mandate the wiping out of an entire people group and the idea that you can't jive with that is probably because you more identify with the people being wiped out right it's because you've been in power and if you understand the world from the position of i come from a culture who's always been in power and i so sit because of that i have to think about power right if you've been there you don't think about it right what having black people in your audience says when we looked at the scriptures we saw a narrative of a people who have been from day one oppressed yeah right from day one right and throughout the entire story and they were always looking for a redeemer and this redeemer came and the redeemer did not only this not only not only freed them physically he freed their minds and their spirits and their souls so that even though they were still under roman occupation we're like even though we are still in this place physically our spirits and our souls are looking towards a greater thing like hebrews like yo we are strangers and pilgrims like we are not of this world right so of course of course when master and the big house ran down to the slave quarters and said you need to read this bible they went the slaves went out and and they're saying the bible saying you see see you see where it says slaves be you know obey your masters right you see how it says that you need to do that them slaves looked at that and they went wow so what you're telling me is there is a savior that despite our physical application despite your roman occupation despite that there's a savior there for me and that i am not of this world so even though i'm sitting in this slave quarter i'm not in this world i'm a part of a different kingdom so when i open the old testament yeah and i see a god that says wait wait wait wait they did what to you wipe them all out right what i see is a conquering king that cares about my suffering right and it's not going to allow subjugation to last for so long you're not going to get away with this yep right and and a god that also says but i love this but i love the oppressor too yeah right because we have examples of ruth moabites and all these different people who are part of jesus's story that were a part of the that were part of the problem yeah the tax collector right that we're a part of the problem so we see a god that says are you kidding me a god that'll wipe out entire people group that's exactly who i'm a rock with you know why cause i've been oppressed right and i need a god that's gonna that's gonna with with vigor and with fervor liberate me from this oppression and with the foresight and the grace to say but if those that i'm about to smite desire freedom yeah you can come holla with me you know what i'm saying so that's what happens when you allow for like the black experience and black liberation theology to be a part of the discussion is you get that and doc like you imagine sitting in front of like some some like little youth group in wisconsin you know what i'm saying trying to lay that out for them kids you imagine that it would free them it would free them it would free them that that's what i'm saying like you know what you said that's the tension of the prophets yeah i grew up southern baptist and we always read the bible and we we saw ourselves as the continuation of the nation of israel we were egypt and we were babylon yeah and we were wrong yeah and we just read the whole thing backwards yeah wow that's powerful and we and we had no way of knowing that because you know i tried to see your church right i grew up in church where we were told that we were this like persecuted oppressed minority in the country but that's ridiculous this was after after billy graham took evangelicalism from a joke of rural communities to a dominant cultural force and before the moral majority took it into the frightening right-wing aligned behemoth that it ultimately became yeah which is is in some ways tragic there were certainly colonial huge colonial themes to billy graham's approach to evangelicalism but in another way in a more flattering light that movement of evangelicalism was a reaction to the extreme removal of god in mainline protestant liberal theology and so there were redemptive movements to it but they got they got lost and all that colonial thrust so i have a question was there a divorce between those ideologies then whether like you said mainline liberal theology and what be started to become american evangelicalism kind of the way you just described well yeah there's this period and this is all white church stuff this is all just straight white church stuff there was a period in america after the second great awakening where you had all these all this construction because every church in america was packed and it was the mainline protestant denominations that embodied all that growth to the point they even like built this inner church council and you know this was this new christian century basically uh and those churches were big and they were strong but they were a lot of them were based on a god that was distant that was very based on very sophisticated intellectual ideas but that you know didn't exactly make you feel known or loved and so and they made fun of fundamentalist movements that were a reaction that were centered in rural white america and but what fundamentalism grew into evangelicalism is it created a god who was personal close and cared and so as that movement took off and billy graham did more than any other person to put evangelical on the map in major cities in america people left mainline churches they left that distant dutch germanic white god for a god who loved them and listened to them and had a plan for their life so it's like the presbyterian and kind of kind of yes it is and so that's when you see the presbyterian methodist numbers evangelicals taking off but you can't divorce that and there were great things about that movement and i'm grateful for everything it taught me as a child the many good things it taught me but you can't divorce that from the role that supporting slavery played in the formation of the southern baptist convention you can't separate that from the roles racism and segregation played in the formation of the world majority when you go back in time when the moral majority was started many evangelicals were undecided on the abortion issue that was not a movement started for abortion it was started in reaction to fear based on desegregation exactly and telling you that that boy whoa i was just gonna say that i was like well it started when you desegregated schools that's what started i don't say it as an accusation because people panic and that's not my movement my point is the reason i will freely admit to anyone at any moment that i am a person with prejudice is because i can do nothing about my prejudice until i'm aware of it yeah and i can do nothing about my historical context until i'm aware of it so if evangelicalism really cares about they say racial reconciliation i don't really care for that term because i don't know that black people need to be reconciled they didn't do anything but racial justice would be to admit those historical roots and repent from them and instead of deny it and try to push it under the rug which is a totally it's a neurocognitive it's nice and i get it and it's scary and it's fine but we will never live in that society where all men are created equal until we admit the part that not only we play but the systems we're a part of and support with our participation are created well that modernist lens also includes such an individualistic thrust that i don't think most white people have a sense of history and connectedness to any story beyond individual my freedoms my you know so i haven't done anything mean to any black person so why should i apologize to anybody you know there's this kind of this isolation that comes with the modernist lens from the enlightenment of parsing everything up and you know being so isolated in that so i think this is what's so hard to communicate to white people is how to see that lens because that you're seeing just yourself yeah just the concept of like collective identity is just yeah built into it yeah that's why i bet you even going back to your experience like voting with john mccain like there was still you may have voted for that person but during that inaugural speech he was just like oh i was proud he was like we did it i cried i'm saying because it's like even though you were just like but i'm glad this happened oh yeah because of your collective yeah identity with israel it's funny because uh the second time around though i did vote for mitt romney second time around uh i remember election night very clearly i was with the group of christians we were having one of those christian nights i guess and it was election night and after the bible study the results came in we turned on the tv and i think there might have been one other black person in a room of 40 plus people and obama won and i was like oh okay we're good it doesn't like i voted for mitt romney yeah but but the um the the depression in the room the feeling of not just my candidate that i picked didn't win it was this sense of it that was actually when i began to wake up hmm was hey i actually voted for this i was actually okay with mitt romney but okay he didn't win we're gonna still be okay but it was a sense of because we have this particular guy who happens to be black yeah you know and i put that in quotations you know because there's still is racial stuff attached to that because it's like i mean you know you don't have to like i don't agree with every other black dude's politics no like you know what i'm saying i don't agree with every other black dude's like pizza toppings there's plenty of things we disagree with yeah i'm saying totally but i'll tell you what if we was in a situation where i'll give you a great example this not to be named blog doesn't exist anymore but i was asked to sort of write this uh kind of treatise on the preachers of l.a right when they when they set out to do that show right and i actually sought counsel from my said uncle that you know i was telling you about earlier he was like look you don't need to be nobody's black bat like if you have an issue with whoever those those people are man those preachers are like you hash that out at home you know what i'm saying and uh but i'm not gonna like in public bash these like black men that are like doing their best to uh you know better their their communities and their civilization in their societies even greater than me being even an la native like i have considerable issues with you know some of the some of the hyper pentecostal sort of sort of movement and what that's done to the black community but i tell you what when the riots hit i'm from l.a when the riots hit let me tell you who was on our street corners broker and peace treaties let me tell you who was like helping us process through what we saw on tv with with the rod and king situation tell you what it wasn't a president or no seminary you know what i'm saying it wasn't it wasn't none of them it was these brothers out here that you would all call heretics they was on our street corners like serving us so if you got an issue with them you know i'm saying y'all go ahead and write your own blogs i'm not gonna do it for you yeah you know what i'm saying so like so even even in that environment where you may look at like a president obama and be like yeah i got plenty of issues yeah with his choices which i don't personally but i'm saying if that was a situation where it's like yeah i got plenty of issues with this policies yeah policies but you're not gonna see me sitting in this room like you know ripping that dude a new one because i'm like i know what he went through yeah and you're not gonna hear it from me now i may if we was like with mommy like spooky in them like we were just talking among the homies i'd be like man it's full you know i'm sad but i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna do that because i understand what's happening systemically i understand what that yeah like you said what that shows that room of people you know what i'm saying and i'm not going to show you that because you're upset for different reasons yeah you know what i'm saying you upset for a totally different reason than i'm saying and i actually i'm incredibly offended by yeah why you're upset yeah you know what i'm saying yeah wow yeah he said something the other night that clicked something into place for me that's embarrassing that took this long to click into place we've often had you know usually it's just one or two people at a time but there's usually some black people with us on tour and um and there's been some times with some of the like one of our drummer terence the guy who's usually with us um there's been times where he's been with all the other white people in the bus for long you know six weeks at a time and then we get somewhere and it's either like a black church or we meet up another you know a gospel group that he knows people and it's this immediate it was always this immediate like all of a sudden he is a different person he comes to life yeah and i was always like a little bummed about it like dude how come you can't yeah i mean you're around this all the time i want you to be like that with me you know and i never really understood that very well but when you said the other night like you had just met william you guys just met that we just met yeah and you said something about like uh you know i just met him but already there's a lot i don't need to know or don't need to figure out i he's a black man here in this time and space i know what he's been through on a lot on a very already yeah yeah and there is this automatic wii u yeah i i've had the experience of your drop your drummer because i i've traveled and i know prop has to with groupings of white people on tour buses and i remember actually last year i believe when i was in south africa with a group of white people first time to africa and i remember and a group of people that i love and they were all cracking these jokes and i was kind of joking with them but three days into it just nothing was funny to me anymore just didn't find any of it funny and i would tell a joke and no one would get in it get it and it would just go over people's heads and about a week went by i actually thought man i don't think i'm funny i think um i don't feel like i am i don't have anything to contribute to this right i get back to la i'm with a more multicultural group of friends next thing you know it was like the jokes that kept coming and i realized it like something clicked in me that was like oh i'm funny i'm just black funny it's different maybe and the different types of humor yeah it really is very different from us from shared shared experiences values exactly and if you have a different group of shared experience so i you know at first i was judging myself and then judging these people and then i went no we just have a different yeah these things aren't these things aren't bad in the sense that like things need scaffolding and oftentimes it's like a joke's not funny if you have to explain it you know what i'm saying in the like you said in your experience or in a terrance experience where it's like there are things that like you would need so many years of experience and for knowledge for me to just make this statement it's like i just i don't even it's about time i explain it's not funny anymore like it's like a silent resignation yeah you're just like you know what it's it's and it's and it's not fair to you it's like that's not fair man like i i'm just again when you're the dominant culture you there was never you never had to learn how to code switch you never had to learn how to how to exist in dual cultures you know what i'm saying this is something that looks like you have to learn how to do it right so you have to you have to learn a basic understanding of white culture right to be able to survive yeah right yeah i have to watch friends to know certain you have to right you know or or you just stay relocated to your part of your district of the country you know what i'm saying and just become a statistic right or uh for me i grew up in a latino neighborhood so like i just had to learn latin culture that's just what it is you know what i'm saying so in in that environment it's like i i feel like i can i would say like culture's language yeah i have a varsity i have a varsity level white card like i i know and appreciate a lot of white culture but that took time but i don't expect that of the white people i'm around like i don't expect that of you and it's fine this is me loving my brother who is like you said is genuinely like you're genuinely terrence's friend yeah like that's that's your boy you know what i'm saying but you was never on a you may have been actually you might be a little different but like you know what i'm saying most time those people never had to be on a bus with like mississippi mass choir for you to have to learn how to function in our culture you know what i'm saying you never had to now what we shouldn't do is hold that against you yeah but just love you through it and and if you desire like you know as we're living like yeah you know pick up on stuff and and remember that like so simple example like i have to remind myself to say bro instead of bruh sometimes when i'm just like hey when i'm with like my white friends like what's up bro you know what i'm saying like i just have to talk like you know about those things hey bro but like what the right bro yo i'm saying like hey yo bruh yo i'm sad but i'm consciously like translating but that's because i love you guys and i desire that i desire you to feel welcomed you know what i'm saying so like i'm not i feel like if if if i turn if we turn the black on you'll feel a little ostracized you feel me so like oh yeah and i've been in settings of it all the time not with you guys but within settings real talk where i down my black up a bit more and it begins it becomes too much and i get told to tone it down white people like all the time one now i've never had that situation now really that's because they know me though like [Music] i never get told hey you're being too black right yeah it comes in other languages it comes in other subtle passive aggressive language yeah and it's like oh okay and i have to remember oh i'm in a different culture they don't they don't appreciate talk like this or at this volume of level or at this this type of humor so there's this richness i guess that's coming from that dualized perspective that my fellow white folks listening right now i so understand how difficult it is to find that first toe hold to appreciate other cultures when the normative narrative the normal experience is that you are exactly as you are and it's fine but even as propaganda talks about bro versus bra like i'm super comfortable people call me bro and i certainly i think i could make a pretty reasonable data-driven claim that i spent far more than average the amount of time for a white person in majority black environments but even with that perspective it's so hard to step outside of a dominant cultural position that when i as i normally do every single time and with a black friend and i call them bro i go oh my gosh do they think i just said bro because they're black do they realize i say bro to everybody and that's such a ridiculous over analytical thing yeah but i'm only saying that to illustrate how blinding dominant cultural positions are that and the way it allow it colors our picture of the world and i want to take that just a little deeper for a second so most white people that i know don't think they're racist at all but then they'll say things like if i'll talk about income rates among black populations versus white population they'll say something like they just need to work harder but let's unpack that for a second with what i just said about being afraid to use the word bro because they're related what you're talking about if you're if you point to any point of data income net worth incarceration rates prosecution rates for the same crime any number of metrics in data that are not in dispute and your answer is so and so needs to work harder or they need to just not get arrested they need to not sell drugs or whatever it is how do you explain that statistical disparity if you're explaining it that you're saying well i guess white people just work harder in what way is that not a racist idea if you can't acknowledge that the validity of those arguments or the weakness in your your claims i get it it's because you're blinded by a dominant cultural narrative that you're a part of yeah so you can't view these things but if if you're if you're not shitty at statistics you can't mathematically project that people who are supposedly equal economic units are going to end at such radically different outcomes yeah unless there is a systemic problem in simple statistics and simple economics there is no other viable explanation of that data yeah can i just say whenever you say dominant cultural narrative i get chills like i feel something on the inside i'm like yeah because no one talks like this you should stay well i know it's like whatever i hear a white person talking about it is like oh you just like i wish i could see the facial expression as he's talking i'm just like we in church over here like i would even add to like and just i mean just common sense like it's just just common sense it's like you're assuming we're starting at the same point have you opened any book about but you know we're not starting at the same point but you got remember the individualism thing where it's because i think there are good people this is a really hard switch it was hard for me to move the switch where you don't because what privilege does is elevates a person into modernism this individualistic like you're an american this american dream you can do whatever you want to do you just have to make the right choices yeah you just have to you know work hard yeah stay in school you know to move from that to i'm a product of a system that is a not only that like on legend i'm a product of a system of privilege that's a hard thing yeah a corrupt system so now you're not only like changing consciousness into this we thing you're also seeing that you're like a puppet of evil you know like and that message that can mess with yourself identity um with you everyone wants to believe they're a good person yeah um and most people are are legitimately trying to be good people you know so yeah i think it's i think it's uh on our shoulders to like grant you that you know i'm saying that like that it it is a tough bit of swallowing and it goes against i mean literally every point of your ex formation of a person you know i'm saying from kindergarten on you know i'm saying like so you need you need to grant them that you know what i'm saying totally so we fight vigorously and mercilessly to point at and to tear down and to destroy and root out any sort of systemic injustice at any place and at any time that we see it we fight with everything that we have because again in our experience or ethos we have an understanding of the balance between the systemic and the individual you know i'm saying like that's already in our personhood so oftentimes we're seamlessly talking about both to separate the two i need to with no mercy point at tear down and fight against the destruction problems but with great grace and with great mercy and with great patience yeah i need to walk with my white brothers and sisters who desire to know more or to oftentimes very unaware or aloof or ignorantly make statements like that and i'm pretty sure it's the same thing like those statements are said to me directly because in their brain we're friends you know what i'm saying yeah and even the proverbial those people that they may be talking about in the abstract i'm like it's my cousin aaron the person you just made up mm-hmm that in this made-up scenario that's my president like that's my family that's my it's my little sister that's my you know what i'm saying like you're describing humans that i not only know are in related to but those dots were never connected you know i'm saying so like i think that this again this dual thing to where it's like there's there's no mercy when it comes to this a loving patience and bearing with on the individual level again if we're talking about someone who's i'm already in relationship with you and desiring totally and i think you i think personally michael you embody that really well like you're someone who is constantly learning and you're constantly growing and like you said there's always grace and space for your friends you know whatever the embarrassment or the mistake of perspective or awareness is it's like i love you you know and the truth is for me many people because black is not a monolithic experience it's not we all don't always have the same exact experience you know for me i bought into a level to post-racial america as well as a child it was taught to me in school you know but i went to different schools i went to white schools i went to black schools and i went to mixed up so i but at some level it was taught to me at some level i bought in and it really was until trayvon martin happened that i started to wake up it felt like i was in asleep for a long time and i bought in and wanted to believe that things were different and things had gotten so better and it was that shocking reminder and then the reminders kept coming you know and so i feel like i'm on that journey with you as well too like we all are not in the same space you think that's pretty common with a lot of like yeah we were watching office recently the office the the american version and it was from you know seven eight years ago i don't know how long ago and some of the jokes that they were telling them i was like you couldn't tell that right now i mean it was like i was like oh i told stanley and somebody was like it was and i was wondering was it just white people that thought we were past being a joke at that point or was was that offensive i think it was mixed i think there were there was a mix of a field yeah you know what you know what you kind of touched on earlier like there was this now there's this population of affluent black right and that's new the last like group of affluent black that we knew of that was like an actual group of of people that had a large enough number you know that was in oklahoma that was black wall street and the city was bombed it like purposely wiped out you know i'm saying so so by the time we got to like the generation of our parents and like you know now we have like third generation college students you know what i'm saying stuff like that so this was a new experience that slavery was only 150 years ago so it was like this was new so i think that that's why you had this diversity of thought among black because now some of us went to college some of us were actually influenced some of us actually moved to the suburbs so there was this this change even among like i'm me being like a la black boy is it considerably different than like some of my southern friends yeah what i'm saying in life and i didn't understand them you know i'm saying like you know west coast black is different from east coast so i really want to talk to that for a second those varying black experiences uh there's a reason i talk about white supremacy a lot as a white person some black people and some people of color because of life circumstances because their character spiritual appearances whatever have this ability to extend a grace and that grace is to explain the problems of race in america while experiencing its harmful effects many other people completely reasonably cannot extend that grace they cannot tell you how the soul of your boot feels while it's on their neck and people tend to get really upset about the tone of racial conversations and this is what i want to say for my white listeners and friends right now and you say what can i do what can i do i i understand this is a problem i've watched these black children die on the news and i can't stand it anymore what can i do first you can listen to the people who are willing to share don't approach a black friend or a black media figure with the expectation that they owe you an education in a system so the first thing you should do is start following voices and listening absorbing and studying like you are in school without comment and then as you learn more perspectives and we're gonna have links to voices and we're gonna have links to reading materials in the show notes for this episode on the liturgist.com to get you started but as you start to understand these systems one of the best things you can do as a white person is taking on the burden of explaining white supremacy to other white people to stop requiring the people suffering from these systems to also explain their harm because no one sadly based on the way human brains process prejudice white people who are starting to wake up or are not awake yet we'd be more comfortable hearing these ideas from white voices what i'm not saying build a speaking career on it i'm not saying utilize your insights to gain monetary advantage that's unethical as much as you can amplify black voices and people of color what i'm talking about is in interpersonal conversations it's easier for you to call out your uncle who uses the n-word at thanksgiving than it is for the person who has to deal with him at the office later we white people have to start driving a conversation about white supremacy with other white people and with our kids and with our children yeah i found they had the first of those conversations with omli the other day five years old she never heard the word slavery before and that was quite a concept to try to communicate to a five-year-old in following some of the people i follow on twitter and reading some of the stuff i've read i raising her in some sort of colorblind way which that's what privilege it's it allows this view of equal playing field because you are empowered to be whoever you're supposed to be and yeah so it was everybody else it was a kind of scary thing for me to like is this going to be devastating for a five-year-old it's like scary to talk about i want to destroy my daughter's world but i also i think i was watching roots at five years old or the color purple yeah yeah yeah by five not only if you black but if you're a black boy by five you're very aware yeah that like oh i'm different like you you're you're you're super aware about that but but you know what but that's not good you know i'm saying like that's like you're right it that sucks like i mean we're forced to grow up very fast and it's not and it's necessary for survival survival yeah like and you know going back to statistics statistically speaking like why in ohio the little boy with the toy gun tamira tamir rice why he got shot is because it was seen as a threat you really 12 year old a little 14 year old boy as a threat is because uh we're just seen we're just made to grow up like so you're just seen as an adult but like he's 14 he's a kid you know what i'm saying he was 12 yeah huh he was 12. he's 12. yeah he's a kid dude like you know what i'm saying and so you're not you're not allowed that innocence i super wish i wish oh man it'd be so great to not have to explain slavery that'd be great dude you know what i'm saying like i mean and i got a mixed child you know what i'm saying so like my eldest child she didn't understand when they talk about illegal immigrants like what does that mean what's your well your uncle you're saying like wall does that mean we can't go see grandma like if you build a wall like what does that mean you know what i'm saying so like you just have to have these conversations yeah but to communicate to her it's it is a trauma in itself i on some level but i think it's a necessary one to say like you are part you see how your skin is lighter than williams yeah you know william's just her friend william she doesn't think of william in terms of black no it's just william's the guy that comes over and she likes playing with yeah i say you see how william has darker skin there are a lot of people that have treated william really poorly because he has darker skin than you and that's like she's like what yeah huh i don't understand going back that's because like they were a long time ago there were people yeah you know that i tried to use words that you can understand like jail or like you know put them in chains like in jail and made like made them work and not paid like trying to explain slavery was such a weird true five-year-old but seeing her response at the end of it was really amazing because she's i tried to explain how like after slavery then sometimes black people couldn't go into certain restaurants or into let's drink out of the same water fountains they're going to the same bathrooms and she's like if and she just got like mad she's like if anybody ever tells one any of friends of mine that are black that they can't do something i'm not doing it either and she's like perfect yeah that's perfect yeah i don't know i'm hopeful for yeah her generation yeah a lot to do in the world but the more that we can teach about our kids about it now that they don't have these some of these same colorblind assumptions and and they can see and i was telling her like you know when you go into a restaurant and how they treat you and when you and they give you a table are nice sometimes that's because of the color of your skin because you have this we have money it's because you you live in a really privileged position and you have to use that for good somehow that's like a you know starting what yeah i'm sure much of it went over her head yeah but it's starting it's hard it's a good start it's a good start yeah it's terrifying i mean yeah and heart and heart wrenching anything hard to communicate to your daughter that she's part of a system it's like as a white person that's for me that was heart-wrenching when i was in sixth grade i was in a remedial english class i'd scored so poorly in fifth grade that i was in the lowest class i could be in without being in the special education class at an undiagnosed learning disability i was the only white student in that class my high school was an affluent school that is some progressivist notion in a blue county in a sea of red counties had intentionally been zoned to incorporate several poor predominantly black neighborhoods in the idea that they would be lifted up by being in a school with affluent white peers what usually happened was they were in the remedial classes while white kids were in the advanced and i was really comfortable in there you know you refer to me as as a woke white person but that's because when i was a kid i was a nerd and it was black students who defended me and so i've always been very comfortable around black people i've actually tended to associate them with physical safety wow so i was in this class we got to black history month the teacher one day asked if any of the students knew dr martin luther king's i have a dream speech but none of them did and she said that she would give an a in the class to anyone who could recite it so i very tentatively raised my hand and she said oh are you volunteering to memorize it i said no i already have i had that summer and so i stood up in the class really sort of sheepishly i wasn't a public speaker in those days and i just recited the whole speech and it was kind of movie-esque so at first the class was kind of rally but the further i went the quieter it got and then it like roused into this cheering and this applause and you know the teacher starts crying so she comes up to me gives me a hug and she gave me an a on everything the rest of the year like it really didn't matter what i did yeah but she told me towards the end of the year she said i've always hoped that your generation was gonna be the one that ends this and that's a beautiful notion i also think it's naive i'd love to say we can solve the problems of systemic racism in this country but there's there's so many factors that have to be mitigated one the human tendencies towards tribalism the natural neurological roots that create race-based prejudices but further there's no simple wand wave that ends dramatic systemic economic inequality and if you start to talk about measures that could actually create an even set of starting blocks for people if you consider life a race which is a pretty shitty competitive medicine in this case what we do let's put it in a white context someone who has millionaire parents who has private tutors and who goes to harvard most white people would say they got a head start in life compared to their middle class upbringing compare your relative wealth to those of the average black family and then a poor black family and think about where all those starting blocks are so if you think about the level of commitment it's going to take as a society to start evening out all those starting blocks so that some children aren't starting not a lap but 20 miles behind right out of the gate this is a problem of complexity and resources similar to climate change we're talking about a fundamental examination of how we relate to wealth and property in this country and i'm not saying i have the answers but i'm saying we don't have a hope of being a generation away from the end of this problem until we've all agreed that we are willing to do whatever it takes yeah and i'm so blown away even in this conversation when i'm so blown away by just hearing what you just said is hearing each other's stories like actually listening to you with amelie and you in sixth grade and you and compton like hearing and even sharing stories that i've never shared what'd you say i said south central anyway south central south central but like don't make me they'll make me pay for that okay yeah you're right yo i i was midwest and east coast it's all good but uh no but hearing each other's stories like i don't think we've created spaces to hear each other's stories like white black latino like we haven't like the depths of each other's stories not just the testimonial at the church cookout you know like the real depths of each other's stories and how we see the world and so i'm just really blown away even by this because there's things i've shared illness that i've never shared even with some of my closest friends thank you um it gives me that gives me hope that when i hear stories like yours and yours and yours i feel like a deeper compassion and empathy in my heart it's like an expansion that happens that's good man this is the best episode we've had tell [Music] [Music] so i'm looking at the keyboard this is one random thought the one we're trying white church versus black church the guitars yeah we love keyboards no i think that's i think it's true like we love the keys like that's how you know you're in blackjack no hardly any guitars it's just like two you'll get two keyboard players with like six keyboards exactly yeah he had a grand piano and a keyboard and this one dude's got like a a nord a triton and his like you know what i'm saying so he's got a million keys yeah you right yep two organ players my dad took me to a black church soon after i started playing bass and when i walked in and the church service started there was an organ it was a set of drums and then the song leader was a bass player and he was just like laying it down while he was leading worship i was like i'm never going back to white church because that was like back when you couldn't even have drums in white church yeah it was just like really dry piano not even a guitar and i was like just this this is the best experience of my life it's like almost like a like a like a blues funk gospel yeah just like he said i start walking it up like i was like what is happening whoa so musically big difference this might get i did want to say something about that go uh well i just started reading ta-nehisi coates between the world and me which i'm a third of the way through and just from the third of the way through i was shocked to find myself in it even though i know it knew it was a book about the black experience you still didn't know you never know what you're gonna get not only did i find myself in it one of the things that was highlighted to me was he grew up in baltimore i grew up in detroit i grew up on the west side of detroit uh i lost family lived in the ghetto i didn't live in the ghetto but we lived in a lower middle class family i was around it but i was not in it day to day and so there's aspects of his experience that i understood or small elements where i remember but i went okay that wasn't fully my experience or i didn't see that reality played out to that level so there were still gaps for me one of the things that that made me realize there were gaps for me and and what he talks about is the the whole treatment of the black body and everything was church was our family's safety from feeling the anxiety and the pain and the fear of being black in america that's the way we coped with it and so i came to that conclusion reading the book and then like three pages later he's talking about i didn't grow up in church my parents were atheists and i didn't have church and the sacred mysteries to try to ease my mind or try to take me away from these harsh realities of the streets and i realized that was the way and then when i started thinking about my family line that was the way my family dealt with racial inequality was through church and it was through music and music was the release music was the uh the shouting the dancing the the passion everything was centered around life is oppressive it's hard we are only passing through and we're gonna make it on the other side yeah and that's that's there's our full circle that's what i was saying earlier like you can't separate nothing about our culture we can't compartmentalize our culture our church experience is tied to our politics yep it's tied to this it's uh and so even in the black experiences it's not monolithic like i said earlier there's so many different varied types of experiences in that and when i look at it when i look at it i actually see so much of the beauty of it now give me that guitar what i'm talking about okay show me what you're talking about is serious stuff michael has to like show you not say it that's serious business is happening um musically when you think music theory black church music versus white church music the keyboards but also the black keys versus the white keys white anytime i'm with the white worship team and i tell them a key's in the black key like if you say it's like an f sharp oh my god not cool musician most black shirts dancing that's the key you want to be in it's the blues it's just the blues baby listen i always feel like michael has some black in them too because i mean you you always the way you do music you play the blues very well you do you really do there's two notes different on the white keys as far as a scale it's major scale versus pentatonic scale but are you getting nerdy on this i'm getting real nerdy right now that's great i apologize all right so when you're dealing with the blues what makes it the blues a lot of times is the note between the the notes between the notes right you're like you're going like those yeah the moans right and there's a longing for finding home there's a longing for i guess it's freedom it's being everything's in its place and if there's this tension there's this longing and blues are born from black yeah pain and being oppressed and there's this longing to be okay this is longing to be free this is not and musically it's like and it's f it's creating tension and then resolving it and there's this hope to that great tension resolving it creating tension resolving it that follows all the way like let's take a song that here i am to worship when you sing it in most white churches um it's not really tension happening it's just kind of moving from chord to consonant consonant consonant consonant consonant to move with the melody and where's your feelings a lot of times if you'll hear a black church do that song they'll change it around a little bit they'll put a little bit like you know do with israel and we do like you're creating this tension that longs to be resolved musically yeah there's this longing about where the notes want to go there's a there's a one is already at home one is already free and fine like yo that's heavy boy it's even in the music and that's why church is the most segregated hour in america still is in 2016. and that is why it's pretty heavy man you're just saying even tonight that's pretty heavy bro i'm i'm with you i'm tracking with you wow this stuff human brains are computers yeah running software they didn't write and that's it so what happens is and what's beautiful about the intersection of people is as you encounter other people you consciously and unconsciously pick up some of their software so dope i say that's how you land right there [Music] the pain that guides us the strength that tires okay so one thing we want to do in regards to where people can find more about your work yeah i'm um propaganda you can all my socials are just prop hip hop you can go to humblebeast.com all of our music's for free or you can buy it or you can listen on spotify which is also free and uh everybody um all of like my tour dates and videos and all that's all just humblebeast.com william got a record coming out yeah i have a record coming out in vapor uh called cosmos with a k yeah you can look that up on itunes uh as well as i'm on spotify but i think itunes were doing the big push but any of my previous music is on uh itunes as well as william matthewsmusic.com twitter william 22 instagram william i'm matthews skadoosh we all chill we out here [Music] you'll be singing over me that's it everybody thanks for listening thanks to greg nordin for his editing help thanks for all of you on patreon who make this show possible we love you very much see you next time