The Movement

It was intriguing to read an article highlighting the catharsis experienced by the Asian-American journalist who watched the box-office hit "Crazy Rich Asians."  A lot of her sentiment could easily be cross pollinated to the wildly enthusiastic reactions of African Americans to the global box-office sensation Black Panther.

The existential challenge of constantly being seen as other, foreign, or invisible in a dominant culture was not lost on me as she exquisitely articulated her angst and celebration of seeing an all Asian cast highlight the complexity of the diaspora found in Asians who have acculturated in many different parts of the world.  She spoke of how refreshing it was to see people that looked like her not portrayed as cheap facsimiles that were either caricatured martial arts experts or tragic survivors of despotic driven pogroms.

Similar to W.E.B.Dubois' allusion to a divided soul, she anguished over the challenge to cultivate an identity that is virtuous to one's heritage while not falling into a crevasse in between.  She introduced  a pejorative term-banana- that could be the equivalent of the derisive "oreo"  I remember hearing hurled at black folks who were accused of assimilating or acting white.  Banana meant that you were "yellow" on the outside but white on the inside.  The thing that struck me about this article is that my friends whose families hailed from Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, or Southeast Asia were never this transparent in their assessment of the duality of cultures many experience in Eurocentric countries.

The hegemony of one culture is engendered by default of population dominance and tribalism. The ubiquity of all things European does not beset one who is not consciously made aware of its preeminence until social eruptions like integration or immigration that could irretrievably alter the demographics of the nation become a concern.  The axiom of the United States being a "melting pot" always struck me as politically and culturally naive.  At best we are a heterogeneous mix, more like a salad where each individual ingredient maintains its own identity within the amalgamation.

 Cinema has long been the creative portal to illustrate the human tapestry that shows the state of the union. Hollywood's portrayal as liberal and egalitarian has not translated in the number of projects like Crazy Rich Asians or Black Panther green lighted by executives. Movie making by its very nature is collaborative and "inclusive."  The challenge has been that the lens by which projects are deemed profitable and having global appeal has been suffocatingly limited to an archetype that finds very little intrinsic value in hues, stories, and narratives that are outside the safe spectrum of their myopic sensibilities.

The story of America's rich heritage found within its incredible citizens is gaining bandwidth.  This is not growing as subtext or sidebars.  There is an increased awareness that the pattern recognition of what it means to be American is decoupling from a tired, familiar trope.  That is actually a good thing.

It was always (still is) my belief that the truth was immutable, inelastic, intractable and not subject to the court of public opinion or vacillating social mores.  With that as a premise, I find the term "my truth" problematic and highly subjective as it has gained increased bandwidth in the national narrative of social movements.  If we expunge moral absolutes, then the basis of this statement undulates like the popularity of dance moves.  I had an interesting discussion with my enlightened, intelligent sixteen-year old daughter about the growing concern of allegations being tantamount to guilt within the context of the #ME TOO movement.

As a husband, father, brother, nephew, uncle, cousin to incredible women and young ladies, I have a less than zero tolerance for inappropriate or violent behavior-verbal or physical-directed towards women! What has become very troubling is that now the hint, allegation, intimation of boorish, crude or aggressive behavior by a man transmogrifies into something resembling the prolific serial assault of Harvey Weinstein, the catalyst behind the movement.  Let me be clear, our patrician culture has without question fostered the behaviors that not only engendered predatory conduct, but I have personally seen the direct impact to women who have been the recipient of this sadistic "boys will be boys" axiom.

However, there seems to be in this glacial swing of the pendulum, a propensity to look past the same abuse of authority that spawned this national uproar. This movement has ignited a conflagration of which no one seems to be concerned about the possibility of collateral damage.  My daughter began to voice a concern about unsubstantiated claims by women not only gaining traction, but even after losing credibility still being given a shelf life that ultimately proved ruinous to the innocent.  My daughter wasn't giving a Stepford wife response as if the accusation against powerful men was without merit.  Somehow, in this new zeitgeist, improbity can not be attached to the accuser.

It seems that the new script singularly affords truth to be the sole domain of the accuser.  The presumption of innocence, a cornerstone of our legal system, seems to be withering on the judicial vine.  There is an old adage that says, ' the abused tend to become abusers."  Unfortunately, there seems to be a dangerous precedent emerging as the scaffolding for the old construct that devalued and subjugated women to this doleful, sexual misconduct without recourse is being torn down. The cautionary tale is what will this much needed shift yield as the voiceless and the powerless are given a platform to change this troubling trend.

                                                             The New Normal

Years ago I posited the ramifications of people's thoughts being audible.  While we have not developed telepathy, the ubiquity of cellular towers has allowed our digital appendages ((smartphones) to create platforms by which all of our mental meanderings or machinations, no matter how mean-spirited, can spill out like a tsunami as tweets, posts, blogs and hi-def pictures.  Our bandwidth has expanded beyond the daily atrocities of murder, mayhem, and geopolitical tragedies to include a drastic reconfiguration of the now very subjective term normal.

Maybe we have misdiagnosed normal all along.  Greek historian Herodotus wrote,'The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing." The Age of Enlightenment was supposed to be the epiphany, the birth of consciousness of rational men and women in control of their own destinies.  The Age of Science purportedly expunged the reliance on superstition, god(s) and religion.  The Promethean promise of progress as humanity dismantled the shackles of ignorance would usher in a Utopian construct by which the endemic challenges of the human condition would be superseded by new insights and technology.

Well............

Few could have imagined that the pace of technological advances could have accelerated the opening of what is essentially Pandora's Box. We have this strange dichotomy of good and evil, which have always co-mingled, battling for dominance not just in the public square, but in the hyper loops of social media platforms.  Bill Gates is fond of quoting statistics from one of his favorite researchers that empirically demonstrate that things are getting better using the metrics of global poverty, average life span, access to healthcare, clean water and reduction of hunger.  Yet with the calculus that created all of these innovations, we can't create an algorithm that explains the surging spiritual drift in our culture. To what do we attribute this current malaise that seems to be ushering in an apparently rhetorical question: what kind of world do we live in?

If we constrict our focus to the natural at the expense of the spiritual, we limit solutions to merely heritage, biology, sociology, politics and economics. Christ summarized the issue with this simple pronouncement, "It's a heart issue."  Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky said,"Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he can not find anything to depend upon either within or outside of himself."Christ expanded his narrative by saying in Mark 7:1," It is not what goes into your body that defiles you, you are defiled by what comes from your heart." (New Living Translation)

The new narrative of our nation, a hodge podge of moral relativism, New Ageism, secular humanism and atheism is not a reflection of new modalities of enlightenment.  It's just symptomatic of  the heart disease we have suffered with since humanity's fall.  This new normal is neither.

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!

                                                                       
                                                                      7:01 P.M.

Yesterday, the nation-in part- paused, reflected with a somewhat reverent solemnity to mark 50 years to the day that an assassin's bullet silenced the arbiter of peace, the drum major for justice whose eloquent, muscular prose and Gandhian inspired non-violent protest called out a nation's hypocrisy when it came to the inalienable rights for all of its citizens espoused in its venerated parchments known as the Constitution.

I couldn't help but reflect on the similitude of 1968 and 2018, a full half century of glacial progress on some issues and tectonic shifts in others.  The nation's report card, the bounced check that Dr. King noted during the tumultuous era of the Civil Rights movement needs to be updated, critiqued, reviewed and digitized.  The algorithm often referenced to denote the progress of blacks in this country is a comparative analysis of their collective socioeconomic position to that of whites.  I have always found that metric inherently flawed and contextually problematic.  The 260 years of arrested development of survivors of the Diaspora make evaluations of economic, social, and political currency difficult to extrapolate.  The collective net worth of all African Americans is still less than two percent of the nation's overall wealth even though we comprise 12 percent of the population.  A microcosm of this wealth inequality is found in a glimpse at the list of American billionaires (563) and the wealth they control ( 2.8 TRILLION). According to Forbes most recent publication, only 3 on that list are black. In fact, the top 3 men on the list's combined net worth exceeds that of all 42 million blacks COMBINED!

The past 50 years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of blacks holding office at the local, state and federal level, including the highest office in the land.  However, this political capital has for the most part only served to enrich the lives of those holding office because the collective socioeconomic status of their constituents has at best seen marginal improvements mostly in the form of services rendered versus material gains in employment and the amassing of wealth. The carceral state-the American prison system-has become a robust private enterprise generating billions in revenue for private shareholders.  It has re-purposed itself from the old Jim Crow era peonage model into a convict labor leasing supply chain producing products consumed globally.  The population driving this business model is disproportionately black men who as products of economically distressed communities ( read-hood) replete with under funded schools and marginal, substantive employment opportunities, represent the de facto raw material for this targeted labor class.

The ascension of a political dilettante effusively spewing race-tinged demagoguery exposed the myth that the state of race relations in the post-millennial age, especially after having Barack Obama as POTUS- dismantled the racist shackles that besmirched this nation's history.  This country has waged  wars on: poverty, crime, and drugs.  The one demographic caught in the cross hairs of ALL three have been primarily people of color with overwhelmingly negative outcomes.  Are blacks in this country better off than the day Dr. King was murdered?  Unequivocally, yes!  We are better off financially, educationally, socially and politically.  But the metrics to evaluate this amelioration is at times fuzzy.  You have to measure the progress of blacks in the aggregate, not just point out that black females are the most well educated group when conversely their average net worth is a micro fraction of white women.  We have a presence in every industrial and economic sector of this great nation but the tribalism that has spawned over the past year is a reminder that in the mind of some "Amuricans"  we will always be seen as visitors, infringers, and parasitic agitators of the anachronistic status quo.

Yet, I still dream!