Will We Ever Learn

Sigh............Roseanne Barr, the shock comedienne who mildly resuscitated her moribund career with a revival of her once popular eponymous show has again suffered from the recurring foot-in-mouth disease that seems to have led to her earlier professional demise.  From her "parody" of the national anthem to her dysfunctional relationship with her ex-husband Tom Arnold, she seems to possess an uncanny ability to reverberate controversy at seemingly every turn.  Her latest premeditated stupidity on Twitter, a virtual dumping ground for 280 characters of vitriol followed by the tired apology of I'm sorry in a tweet, has left an indelible digital footprint that garnered a swift and fatal blow to her already toxic bandwidth on network television.

Conservatives will most certainly defend her repugnant comparison of Valerie Jarrett as resembling the progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood and a simian as a bad joke in poor taste conflated to silence the paucity of Hollywood actors that serve as an advocate for their Twitterer-in-Chief.  What will again be lost in the diatribe of cultural wars is a dissonance that allows this kind of rabidly racist banter to still have traction in the new millineum. Racism in pockets of America is so imbued in the fabric of our nation that we can't seem to recognize how it has permeated the policies, practices and perceptions of the people who sacrosanctly declare themselves exceptional because they are American and of European descent. On November 24th, 1859, Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Life."   This pseudo-scientific publication is credited with being the foundation for evolutionary biology. What it also birthed are horrific ideological permutations in the form of Social Darwinism and Eugenics and the hegemony of racial superiority-more specifically of the Anglo-Saxon breed commonly known as white supremacy.

This mutant ideation buttressed the savagery that accompanied chattel slavery; the de facto economic engine that ushered this former British colony into a global industrial power.  Everything from the biblical justification for slavery, black codes, eugenics, Jim Crow and the bastardly publication featured in this blog was spawned from the egregious belief that races of color were not just inferior, but genetically and innately subordinate- which by the way is the antithetical view promulgated by the Bible!  Porch monkey, baboon, ape, and other disparaging adjectives have been hurled at black folks probably since the first forced immigrants got here in Jamestown off of a Dutch ship. The implicit bias that still allows centuries-old ideologies to lie dormant in the hearts and minds of its supposedly informed citizens of this decade should not only be a tired trope, but an indictment to the myth that we have ever been a post-racial country.  Any redress of grievances by blacks of the tentacles of this social carcinogen in the form of policies, procedures, and practices of an organization are still summarily dismissed or spun into a hijacked narrative featuring the derisive moniker "playing the race card."

So let's just call a spade a spade.  What has made this country great is its ability for introspection.  The edicts of its sacred parchments and pledges declare liberty and justice for all and the inalienable rights of its citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Yet we are still chronicling Fortune 500 companies having to shut down to have "inclusivity" training and police chiefs walking back the conduct of police officers caught on video engaging in extrajudicial conduct.  We have a sitting President who purposefully engendered an anachronistic tribalism and racist jingoism ( "Go back to Africa") that would have made ol' racist stalwarts like Birmingham, Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor grin from ear to ear.  The problem is that the past is STILL NOT PROLOGUE or PAST.  The question is, how much of that toxin are you willing to settle with today and in the future!

                                         

                                                 Made in the Image and Likeness of God

I have been pondering, more accurately commiserating over the elastic social mores, the undulating morality of our culture in which the ribald, profane and straight up wicked lifestyles can seamlessly intertwine with the sacred.  One of the unintended consequences of “tolerance” or moral relativism is that it pasteurizes, homogenizes and dilutes the sacrality of the righteous standards of the Bible-God’s immutable, inerrant, infallible word. Some of us in the body of Christ are so thirsty for the acceptance of the lost that we continue to create “seeker-friendly” environments that expunge any element that would bring conviction or condemnation to people bound by sin.  Oh yeah, the “s” word!  Despite Romans 3:23 clear declaration that,” all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”, and the Jeremiah 17:9 edict ,”The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it”, we continue to capitulate the myth that man is intrinsically good and in an effort to spare people’s feelings refuse to emphatically articulate the dreaded disease we were all born with….. a SIN nature.

Part of my diatribe is based upon the recent release of a “gospel” album by the west coast rap legend Snoop Dogg. The urban street poet’s offering has been gulped with an enthusiasm that mimics the purple, cyanide-laced Kool-Aid of the Jim Jones followers. Your rebuttal may be that the content was palatable, beats were on point and it was more than a pedestrian effort by a secular artist to do something positive.  You get no argument on any of those points.  However, there is a growing bandwidth of tolerance for duplicitousness or a dichotomy between lifestyle and art. I happen to have the misfortune of being asked to listen to Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr’s( Snoop's government name) response to the egregious tirade of one lost soul known as Kanye West.  The expletives projectile vomited from his mouth reminded me of this strange fire that we have gotten so comfortable with.

“Everybody cusses” is the refrain I often hear or worse; “God knows my heart and I am a work in progress”.  Psalm 84:2 says, “My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.”  Psalm 119:11 says, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.”  Ephesians 2:10 says,”For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” II Cor 5:17 says, If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature : old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”  Gal 5:22-23 says,” But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentles and SELF CONTROL!”

What is being lost in translation is that GOD IS HOLY above all things.  His spirit, the incorruptible seed, that indwells us at the moment of salvation, comes with a promise.  John 15:7 says, “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”  What that DOES NOT means is a laundry list of material acquisitions. Verse 8 of that chapter says, “ This is to my Father’s glory that you bear much fruit.”  That promise declares that He will respond to every longing for personal righteousness; a process like human growth takes time and is gradual. We seem to more and more celebrate people who either have rotting fruit, a twig of a vine or the similitude of godliness( having a form of godliness but denying the power therof).  WE ARE the salt and light.  Jesus said in John 12:32, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.”  The evidence of the power of salvation, the actual indwelling of the spirit of God, is a TRANSFORMED LIFE, not snippets of goodness, accepting an invite to a gospel function or recording with so-called gospel artists.  We have become afraid to demonstrate the immutable characteristics of God, His holiness and His righteousness.  The Great Commission was to go and make disciples- spread His teachings to the nations through the spoken and demonstrated Word.  Catering to secularism, moral relativism and flat out wickedness not only is an exercise in futility, it exacerbates the effort of those who understand that to live for Christ is counter cultural and antithetical to Aleister Crowley’s destructive edict to “ Do what thou wilt.” Run tell that!

The Elephant in the Room (Black Republicans)

                                           
                                            Confessions of a Conservative

   
Three years ago, I was asked by a graduating senior from Florida A&M University's School of Journalism and Graphic Design to participate in a documentary featuring what can best be described as a UFO sighting in the South-a black Republican.  I was intrigued to see how this query would unfold as the enthusiastic and talented journalism students set up their equipment to begin recording the ideations of a black man who had pledged allegiance to a party that had for all intents and purposes-this was well before the jingoistic nationalism that followed Trump-had become the bane of society in the minds of many in the black community.

I was not given any prompts and had no real template to follow other than responding to prepared questions that purportedly would shed light on "turncoats" like me.  The filming was done in a beautiful, downtown park with wonderful vistas of the city.  Unfortunately, our start time was at the precipice of the cool morning air being usurped by the toasty, early afternoon sun that seemed to raise the ambient temperature at least 10-15 degrees.  "All of my life I had to fight"....oops, wrong monologue.  I am the progeny of a college professor and a student of the Bible.  Education, or the intrinsic desire to teach, inform, enlighten has been modeled to me for as long as I can remember. Perris began his question with what felt like a genuine desire to dig beneath the acrimonious veneer ascribed to so many who dared to be identified as conservative and have melanin in their skin.

To give context to my position, I gleaned from the history of the two parties and their duplicitous relationship with the descendants of the Diaspora.  If you actually get a chance to watch the video, I was pleasantly surprised that most of the content is derived from the historical and current information I shared with the journalist in training.  I could see that they were intrigued at the fact that I could talk in detail about not just the history of the Republican party, but articulate why the mass exodus of blacks from a party that assiduously advocated for the right of former slaves to fully engage in the inalienable rights of the venerated Republic.  The political climate today, in the Age of Trump, has denigrated black conservatives to the level of social pariahs or caricatures.  It becomes exhausting trying to extrapolate the difference between being a member of the GOP and supporting the caustic, demagoguery of a political dilettante.

There is a distinct ideological dichotomy between sycophants that blindly support the petulant, digital sophistry of a movement that usurped the party of Lincoln.  I am not a party-at-all-cost type of dude.  I was very verbal about my distaste for the way so-called Conservatives tolerated, condoned, engendered the toxic, nationalistic banter that led to the ascension of this President. He is the antithesis of Barack Obama.  For some, that is all that was needed, independent of the uber-liberal agenda he promulgated.  I am still conservative, just don't for a hot second believe that the putrid ideations attached to this iteration of the Republican party represent me!