‘Our Tsunami’: Race, Religion and Mourning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

The Guest Sermon today is from my colleague and friend, Rev. Dr. Maurice O. Wallace

'Our Tsunami’: Race, Religion and Mourning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

And when he was come night, even now at the descent of the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the might works that they had seen; Saying Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven and glory in the highest. And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. And when he was come near, he beheld the city and wept over it. (Luke 19:37-41)

Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought
by Hurricane Katrina as ‘our tsunami’… (David Gonzales, “The Victims, Largely Poor and Black” The New York Times)

I. I am sick today, with grief. A grief, significantly exacerbated by a deepening consternation I have for the general health and, from my point of view, the dubious well-being of the church in America today. I am gravely worried, about what I perceive, as a conflict, a contradiction, if you may, between our increasing religiosity, on the one hand, and our decreasing relevance and vitality to change the world’s conditions, on the other hand. I am troubled, this morning, grievously troubled, by the popularity of a commercial Christianity that romanticizes our faith for the sake of capital campaigns, political favor and box office receipts, and misrepresents the journey as fast and furious, when the way is oft-times arduous and long-winded. It is disturbing, beloved, that the measure of our faith today is so often in the spectacle-charm of charismatic display that charisma now trumps compassion as the essential element, the sine qua non, of Christian identity in the most popular churches in America today. Worship is so singularly worshipped, and bells-and-whistle praise so fashionable now, that the experience of church today is all celebration, and no sympathy at all. Which is not to say that celebration is incompatible with worship but any man who only ever celebrates, who treats life as an interminable party, has no time or inclination to contemplate the extreme weight of black urban life and loss incomprehensibly endured in Louisiana and Mississippi last week. His humanity, and the human prospect for godliness within him, is thus diminished by his indifference. The very thing that would realize his divine potential, the praise craze of this current age helps him, tragically, to avert. It is a reflex of the religious I believe I comprehend, but can’t quite understand.

Only one month ago, on the very same day that an estimated ten to fifteen thousand marched along Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Drive to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and to mobilize support for its extension, the Atlanta Georgia Dome, World Congress Center, Philips Arena and International Plaza were nearly filled to the rafters with more than 100,000 predominantly black churchgoers gathered for MegaFest 2005, the star-studded super conference and Christian entertainment event brilliantly conceived by Rev. T. D. Jakes, the most popular, most charismatic, most sermonically adept television evangelist in the last twenty-five years. Now I was not there, but I am given to understand anecdotally that a spirited time was had by all. It was a monumental celebration of Jesus as Lord, like none Atlanta had seen since the first Jakes conference there in 1999. Surely, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago could not have held a candle to 100,000 brothers and sisters, “saved, sanctified, blood-bought and Holy Ghost-filled,” churchin’ together in the black cultural holy city, Hotlanta, in 2005. But for all the celebration there one month ago, I am bothered that I don’t hear the lamentations, the fervor, the loud din of mourning by those who got bought whole new wardrobes and even got their “h’ir did”--shout out to Missy Elliot--just for Megafest (I’m sorry, that wasn’t nice, was it?).

Was that celebration so intoxicating that it numbed all 100,000 celebrants to the horror of Hurricane Katrina, the outrage of official race- and class-based abandonment of thousands to spiritual despair and the cruelest indignities of death? Where is the mega-aid from Mega-fest and its corporate sponsors? Where were the mega-buses to evacuate the stranded and struggling? Worse still, why has there been no exercise of the mega-influence of so many black religious persons, a goodly number of whom cast their vote for the present Administration last November, to demand something from this President, a man who spends more time in Texas, it seems, than in Washington (though it hardly matters where he is anymore since, from a certain point of view, he’s been on vacation his whole presidency). I do not mean to pick on Rev. Jakes exclusively. He is but a symbol for a new black evangelicalism that seems far more preoccupied by gay marriage and “judicial activism” than by human and civil rights. To be fair to Rev. Jakes, it is true that he has not been indifferent to this disaster and has coordinated a relief effort led by his own 30,000 member church, The Potter’s House, in partnership with a dozen other largely black mega-ministries. It is reported they have given $250,000 in food, water, clothing and first aid and Jakes’s church has opened its elementary school to the children of the displaced who end up, intentionally or aimlessly, in Dallas. As generous as this aid may seem, however (or ungenerous, depending on your perspective of things), the new black church in America has left altogether untouched its greatest resource to relieve the suffering of so many who weekly support them. One thing, Jesus admonished the rich young ruler, thou yet lacketh. With more than $400 billion wasted on an unjust war in Iraq, how could the church let our Gulf Coast neighbors be so egregiously insulted by a congressional appropriation of one-fortieth of that sum? What will it take for the black church, its evangelicals especially, to expend its newfound political influence in order to save souls?

Who but the black church has the moral and political capital to agitate on behalf of the Gulf coast’s disinherited, the likes of whom Jesus was so unambiguously clear about defending? And not only defending, but feeding. He did not, after all, only fly by Jerusalem, and think his duty done. No, as Brother Kanye West recently reminded us, Jesus walked. He doesn’t do fly-bys. Jesus walks, is West’s refrain. He doesn’t make political speeches full of promises come too little too late. Jesus walks. With the shoeless and the shirtless. Jesus walks. With the stranded and the starving. Jesus walks. On the ground. He walks. Through hell and high water. He walks. With neighborly compassion, not executive conceit. He walks. But more than that. He feeds. Four thousand here. Five thousand there. He feeds them who hunger. No signs of looting, no bottleless babies, no outbreaks of violent frustration, though the potential is there. Because he feeds his friends. With only twelve volunteers and the most restricted of resources, he did what FEMA and Homeland Security obviously cannot.

I don’t’ understand it. If the Savior can feed thousands with a team of only twelve and the most meager means, then somebody tell me why the leadership of the mightiest nation on the globe cannot coordinate its unsearchable resources with at least the equal efficiency of an un-degreed Hebrew carpenter? Wait. Don’t answer that. I already know the sad, un-American answer. We all do.

II. It is the Lukan picture of Jesus that I have called your attention to this morning, because it is the picture of the most essential response any of us, conventioneer or president, could have to the Gulf coast apocalypse some have called “our tsunami” in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. For Hurricane Katrina is indeed “our tsunami” as much as it is that of the unmoored masses of Biloxi, New Orleans and—lest we forget—Sri Lanka.

Witness Jesus atop Mount Olive. From that mountain platform, he commanded the full panoramic view of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from the East across the Kidron Valley. Behind him set Jericho. And closer still, Bethany. At his feet fall the praises of them who proclaim him Lord and King, fulfillment of the prophecy. And it would be a thrilling scene, except for the curious disconnect between him and them. They celebrate, but he mourns. Looking down from Olivet , he mourns. Mourns over Jerusalem. He sees a bigger picture, commands a wider perspective and mourns for Jerusalem. Thousands and thousands of churches will conduct worship this morning with shouting and celebration, clapping and dancing, and miss the point made by the example of Jesus: Its mourning time. Jerusalem’s in jeopardy. Its mourning time.

Somehow, we’ve lost sight of the importance of mourning. Of the redemptive value of sackcloth and ashes. Somehow, we’ve been mis-educated, theologically misinformed, led away from of our tradition, and have come to regard mourning only as a sign of hopeless resignation and sinking sadness But I want to suggest that mourning is more than resignation; in mourning is the potential for redress and resistance. It is not the white flag of surrender it appears to be to uninitiated eyes. But it is a passionate protest against the tyranny of death. Mourning is a sit-in against loss, a public petition that will not keep silent. Mourning is the spectacle refusal of indifference, apathy, chauvinism, and injustice. Today is a day of mourning. A day for un-silenceable sorrow and unappeasable complaint against environmental racism, corporate looting by big oil, against presidential arrogance and insensitivity, third-world poverty in affluent America, against the wretched light in which black life in America and Africa is seen, against a political unconscious which perceives New Orleans as Baghdad, and Mississippi as Afghanistan. This is our tsunami.

So let us mourn with those who mourn. Weep with those who weep. Cry aloud with anguish at what has befallen us at the gulf coast. For it is only by God’s inscrutable grace that what has happened miles from here, did not happen precisely here. In any event, this is our tsunami. And it is mourning time. Let us raise our voices in bitter lament, conceding that while our praise may get us goodies from a giving God, it is our mourning that provokes a mothering God to radical action on behalf of oppressed and suffering people. This is our tsunami. And so I mourn with Louisiana. I mourn with Mississippi. I mourn with Alabama. And I have only this confidence for my food and comfort:

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed
And though the mountains be carried in the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with swelling thereof.
There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.
The holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God shall help her, and that right early.
The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved
He uttered his voice, the earth melted.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
God bless you. Amen.

***

Maurice Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideology in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995

Race-ing Katrina

Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues

To understand the carnage currently taking place in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast region, one has to understand what life was for many folks who lived in the city of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was a city in which nearly 70% of its inhabitants were of African-descent. Of the city’s nearly 450,000 residents, over 23% live below the federal poverty level and nearly 40% of children under the age of 18 also live below the poverty line, to say nothing of those folks whose incomes are above the poverty level, but still exist in a tenuous economic state. Tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina has and will still expose many shortcomings in human nature, the federal government and political leadership—those elected and anointed—but for this moment, she has powerfully exposed the reality of race, class and poverty in the United States. Many of those who have died and will still die will have done so simply because they were poor and/or they were black.

As many were enthralled by the human and natural dramas taking place in the Gulf Coast region, the news that there was an increase of the number of people living in poverty in this country went virtually unnoticed. The more discerning viewer of national media coverage of Katrina could have guessed as much without the aid of a national report. The reality is that some of New Orleans’ residents were already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of poverty, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect. Ironically we can thank the national media, who quite unintentionally, exposed the world to the reality of poverty in the region, even as it took many outlets 3 or 4 days to wrap their head around the fact that the majority of city’s residents were black. While the national media might have been oblivious or at least unwilling to openly address the racial component of the disaster—including the absolute failure to contextualize the slow pace of federal assistance with the reality of who they were charged to assist and the subsequent “looting” that occurred—let’s not believe that the powers to be were not. New Orleans, like far too many of America’s urban centers, needed a Marshall Plan (like the one going down in Iraq), long before Katrina came ashore. The failure of the federal government to fully address the city’s near state of crisis before Katrina—including the failure to deal with an aging and inadequate levee system—had a great deal to do with the kinds of people who lived there.

The title of Thomas Shapiro’s recent book The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality is perhaps a fitting metaphor for what it meant to be black and poor in a city like New Orleans. Although Shapiro’s concern was over the wealth gap that exist between middle class blacks and whites and the extra costs associated with being black and middle class—higher mortgage rates, less equity, and less financial flexibility, among others—there are clearly also added costs associated with being black and poor. For so many poor people in this country, there is an understanding that poverty has added costs—not only are you poor, but you are forced to live in environments that often lack vital resources or at least the kinds of resources that those with significantly healthier economic profiles have come to take for granted. And the black poor have long understood this—this is exactly what Bessie Smith sang about in “Backwater Blues” (1927), her mediation on what it meant to be black and poor and forced to live in a place where whenever the waters of the Mississippi rose, there was a good chance you would lose all your earthly possessions. In the context of Hurricane Katrina, that added cost may have been your life or at the very least the scorn of a nation that couldn’t quite understand why you were “so black” and “so poor”. Thousands of American citizens became “refugees” in the eyes of the American public and while we understand that a refugee is one who seeks “refuge”, let’s also be clear that for most Americans that term has been largely applied to “boat people” fleeing the tyranny of their native lands. And in that regard maybe “refugee” is the fitting term.

Kanye West—brave as he is in his attempt the fill the leadership void amongst hip-hop artists since the murder of Tupac Shakur—was right when he said “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black people”, but we need to complicate that sentiment. It is perhaps too easy to suggest that the federal government’s response to Katrina would have been more emphatic if it occurred in largely white communities. The initially tepid and lazy response to Katrina in New Orleans wasn’t just a product of racist neglect, it was also the product of the devaluation of whole communities because they didn’t posses political capital. In other words the black poor of New Orleans were politically irrelevant thus it didn’t matter what happened to them because they were incapable of holding anybody accountable for their tenuous state. Yes, President Bush would have responded more quickly in Florida, but not simply because his brother is the governor of the state, or that the state is more visibly “non-black”, but because the Florida possesses a white and Spanish-speaking electorate that votes and thus can hold any damn body accountable for their failure to respond in a timely matter. On some level the sudden (and legitimate) indignation of black political leadership—The Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., Rev. Al Sharpton, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, etc—was insulting. There has long been cause for such indignation: the erosion of Civil Rights legislation, the prison industrial complex, the dysfunctionality of the electoral process, the tragedy of urban schooling, homophobic and misogynist violence, and the criminal justice system among them. As the images of the black poor in New Orleans began to circulate, it not only exposed social crevices caused by race and class, but perhaps, the irrelevancy of current black political leadership. The indignation of black political leadership was as much a last stab at validation as it was a legitimate attempt to find recourse for those suffering in New Orleans and other regions of the Gulf Coast.

***

Literally as the heritage of New Orleans washes away in defiled and diseased waters, there’s little doubt that there was a new blues that was birthed on rooftops, in the Superdome and outside the New Orleans Convention Center. The stories of those children and young people who were forced to suffer have yet to be told and they will be told in the music, visual art, literature and body movements that have yet to come—except in the nightmares these folk have confronted them nearly every night since Katrina’s land-fall became a reality. Katrina was an incredible disaster, but let’s hope that her most lasting effect will be to rattle the foundations of a democracy that has failed to live up to its own promises.


NP: Wynton Marsalis--In This House, On This Morning

March of the Penguins and the Struggles of Fatherhood

I had the chance to view the new documentary March of the Penguins. Narrated by seasoned actor Morgan Freeman, March of the Penguins tells the extraordinary story of the Emperor Penguins. At once a story about migration, survival in inhospitable environments (winter in Antarctica) and commitment, Freeman perhaps says it best when he says “in the harshest place on earth, love finds away”. As the film’s producers’ describe March of the Penguins:

Each winter, alone in the pitiless ice deserts of Antarctica, deep in the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, a truly remarkable journey takes place as it has done for millennia. Emperor penguins in their thousands abandon the deep blue security of their ocean home and clamber onto the frozen ice to begin their long journey into a region so bleak, so extreme, it supports no other wildlife at this time of year. In single file, the penguins march blinded by blizzards, buffeted by gale force winds. Resolute, indomitable, driven by the overpowering urge to reproduce, to assure the survival of the species.

Understandably the general consensus among critics is that March of the Penguins is the “feel good” movie of the summer.

But locked deeply into this story of sweet survival is the relative seamless ease in which the female and male Emperor Penguins trade gender roles in an attempt to guarantee the survival of the species. Male Emperor penguins spend more than two months nurturing their un-hatched eggs, while the female Emperor Penguins return to the ocean to feed. The penguin chicks are in fact born while the mother’s are still away, thus the father’s are responsible for the first feeding—a small amount of a milk like substance that they’ve been holding in their mouths despite the fact that the fathers have not eaten in over four months. The mother and fathers trade roles as primary nurturers until the chicks are old-enough to fend for themselves—and only then does the family disperse. I’m pretty sure there’s no discourse among the penguins that suggest that the male penguins are “less of a penguin” because of the fluidity of gender roles.



I watched March of the Penguins with my oldest whurl-a-gurl. She’s turns 7 in two weeks and has a week off until 2nd grade starts up next Thursday. Our day at the movies was one of few times we’ve had to hang out with each other. She reminds me quite often that it was not always the case that daddy had to set aside time to spend with her. Earlier in my career, when I was an assistant professor with no reputation (good or bad), I would often get her from daycare early so that we could take walks, hang out at the Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza or chill at the Albany Starbucks. I often tell folks that the beauty of the academic life is not that we have summer’s off (which we rarely do), but rather the flexibility of our work schedules—I would sometimes go to my oldest daughter’s daycare to read to her class, for example. Alas my youngest whurl-a-gurl (nearly 3) will never have the kind or relationship with me that my oldest had with me when she was nearly 3.

As so much of my life has become defined by “the grind” and legitimately so, I do lament that I can’t always be the “nurturing father” that I want to be. My oldest whurl-a-gurl will often say that she wished that I had a “regular” job, instead of being a “book writer” and “professor”. In her mind, if I had a “regular” job, I’d have more time to spend with her. Alas there are lots of folks with “regular” jobs who also need to be on the grind—mortgages, car payments, child-care, toddler gymnastics, in some cases private school tuition, art camp, etc. are all real things that desire real finances. There may be some bad parenting going on in contemporary America, but there is a lot of good parenting that is challenged everyday by the need to help our children better navigate the world that we’ve made for them. In this regard, perhaps I envy the Emperor Penguin.

NewBlackMan News and Notes, Volume One

I Bling Because I’m Happy

Just as TD Jakes and the crew descended on the ATL for this year’s Megafest, Marc Lamont Hill dropped a brilliant critique of the New Black Church. Reminds me a few years ago when I saw a commercial for one of Jakes’ spiritual cruises and the images seemed reminiscent of Jigga’s “Big Pimpin’” video.


Race Gender and the Wedding Crashers

My girl Debra Dickerson has an interesting piece on the race and gender politics missing from the Wedding Crashers. Some deeply personal stuff here about some black women coming to terms with their self-worth in a society that so-often deems them unworthy and renders them invisible. There’s a more personal backdrop to Debra’s essay that she doesn’t discuss, though hopefully one day she will write about.


Pimps and Mo’ Pimps

Esther Iverem, founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com has a 2-fer this month on Pimpology. “Over Powered By Pimps” is Esther’s take on Hustle and Flow, but it’s her smart retro read of Purple Rain Pimpology that got me locked in. BTW SeeingBlack.com is black-owned, black operated and a great monthly site.


The Economy of Parenting

Jabari Asim, one of my favorite writers and favorite people, has a nice piece on parenting up at The Washington Post, where he’s a weekly columnist and senior editor of Book World.


Voting Rights Act at 40

Rev. Jesse Jackson and Barbara Arnwine, executive director of The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, put the RIGHT on blast in a conversation with NPR’s Ed Gordon about the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2007. This is the Rev. Jackson that I’d like hear more often.


Both Sides of the Surface (BSOTS) Podcast

Jason Randall Smith is a fine poet—his poem >“A Lesson in Deterioration” opens my book >Soul Babies. But Jason is a spinner at heart; Hear his first podcast. Dwight Trible and The Life Force Trio make an appearance towards the end.


Nick Cannon (again) or the beauty of blogging

Annette John-Hall did a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer
on Nick Cannon’s “Can I Live?”. I’m quoted in the piece, though it’s not anything I didn’t say in my blog entry on June 27, 2005 about Cannon’s song. But that’s the point—homegirl called me for an interview about her story because she read my blog entry. Cool.

Bakari Kitwana, Political Writing and the Harlem Book Fair

A portion of my recent conversation with Bakari Kitwana is now live over at AOL BlackVoices. I reviewed Bakari’s Hip-Hop Generation for Africana.com back in 2002, when I had less of a sense of his project. Over the last few years I’ve come to greatly appreciate his commitment to expanding the available language currently used to discuss hip-hop as well as his investment in coalition politics, as rooted in his notion of a multicultural, multi-racial hip-hop electorate. Our conversation is just a small glimpse of the ideas he expounds throughout his new book Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop.

I sat down with Bakari (via phone) only a week or so after his controversial essay The Cotton Club was published in the Village Voice. The premise of Bakari’s essay is that there is, in fact, a vibrant political scene in underground hip-hop, that is largely populated by black artists and white audiences. I had just read Bakari’s essay when I walked into the Barnes & Noble here in Durham, trying to track down a copy of the new Leela James cd. With Leela no where to be found, I did fid an interesting hip-hop display, which featured what I’ll diplomatically call “white boy hip-hop”: Aesop, Gift of Gab, MF Doom, etc. When I pressed the manager about the logic behind the display, he responded that if B&N was gonna have a hip-hop display, it was gonna be “good hip-hop.” Common, Missy, Jay Z aren’t “good hip-hop”?. Hell, here we are in Durham; had the cat ever heard of Little Brother?

There is lots of anxiety about Bakari’s new book and his Village Voice piece from folk who believe that he is advocating the jettisoning of a black specific political agenda, which thankfully, if you read the book closely, is not the case. On the other hand, I am having real reservations about the emergence of a generation of cultural gatekeepers—editors, program directors, concert promoters and even Barnes & Noble managers—who have little connection with hip hop’s history or aesthetic criteria. Too many cats in the game now don’t know nothing about Big Daddy Kane—I’m not just being nostalgic here. For example, I can’t claim to be a scholar of American literature if I can’t engage Walt Whitman with the same verve that I do James Baldwin—men who wrote in different centuries. In my specific case, I can’t call myself a scholar/critic of Black Popular Culture if I can’t engage Mary J. Blige with the same sophistication that I engage Aretha Franklin.

***

Bakari Kitwana was among the panelist who were convened at this year’s Harlem Book Fair to discuss the “devolution” of hip-hop. While Gwendolyn Pough, Nelson George, Danyel Smith, Bakari and I talked, across the street at the Schomburg, C-Span was broadcasting another Harlem Book Fair panel about Black Political Writing in the 21st Century that featured Kevin Powell, Yvonne Bynoe and senior political scientist Ron Walters (University of Maryland). The irony of the two panels being scheduled at the same time is that the commentary on the hip-hop panel was as political as that which the “political writing” panel engaged in. Unfortunately for far too many, the general expectation is that if you put together a panel with hip-hop generation writers, then the sum total of our available knowledges is a conversation that covers ground about the beef between 50 Cent and The Game. And indeed for many of the Civil Rights Generation, that’s all there is to hip-hop. But as our colleagues Kevin Powell and Yvonne Bynoe evidenced throughout the “political writing” panel, any sophisticated engagement with hip-hop is an engagement with the social, political, cultural, and intellectual forces that created it. As Yvonne Bynoe stated so eloquently, when all is said and done, she’s a married parent, looking for the same quality of life issues that any married parent is looking for.

A month ago I lamented that hip-hop lacked it’s Audre Lorde. Hearing us do our thing at the Harlem Book Fair last Sunday I realized that we—Bakari Kitwana, Kevin Powell, Danyel Smith, Gwedonlyn Pough, Nelson George, Greg Tate, Yvonne Bynoe…Joan Morgan, William Jelani Cobb, Akiba Solomon, Lawrence Jackson, Farai Chideya, Miles Marshall Lewis, S. Craig Watkins, Imani Perry, Scott Poulsen-Bryant, Davey D and so many, many more—are already our generation’s Lorde…and Baldwin. Now it is just the matter of us having the faith to do the work that we have been primed to do.

“Lesbianism is about to take over our community”: The Homophobic “wisdom” of Reverend Willie Wilson

I’m late on this one…

During his sermon on July 3, 2005 Reverend Willie Wilson of Washington D.C.’s Union Temple unleashed a homophobic and sexist rant, which included the claim that “lesbianism is about to take over” the black community. One of the most prominent ministers in D.C., Wilson is also the Executive Director of the Millions More Movement march, which will commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the Million Man March in October of this year.

Included among Rev. Wilson’s “insightful” observations is the notion that

Sisters are making more money than brothers and its creating problems…that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians.

Huh? Seems like a classic case of masculine anxiety, as if women choose same sex relationships solely out of a dissatisfaction with men.

While I agree with the tensions associated with "sisters making more money that brothers”, the reality is that the tensions are rooted in the inability of black men to see their self-worth as being more than making money and being the primary “provider”. Bruh if you ain’t got a job, pick up a broom and sweep the floor; hit the hamper and do some laundry; hell, pull out a pot or two and get to cookin’, and guess what, just because your labor is now relegated to the domestic sphere, that don’t make you any less of a man—just like working in the kitchen don’t make women any less of a women or a human being.

But then Rev. Wilson just gets vile. On lesbian relationships he states:

anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, its something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that…No wonder your behind is bleeding.

WHOA. What’s up with this cat? And this was in a church, right? And this cat considers himself a community leader? And we want to blame all the misogyny and homophobia in the black community on some rappers…?

Activists like Phil Pannell and Keith Boykin were of course ON this. Wilson’s diatribe comes months after Boykin’s celebrated hug of Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam and the spiritual figurehead for the Millions More Movement march. During their embrace, Farrakhan promised Boykin that black gays and lesbians would be welcomed at the march. That’s a hell of a welcoming speech by Wilson—It recalls some of the equally vile comments made by Bishop George Augustus Stallings of the Imani Temple who responded to charges of homophobia during the planning stages of the 1995 Million Man March with the quip:

What do you want, some milquetoast, sissy faggot to lead you to the promised land?

Farrakhan was silent then and thus far has been silent about Wilson.

Equally maddening is the coverage of Wilson’s comments in the mainstream press. BlackAmericaWeb.com is to be commended for covering the controversy, but their headline Black Homosexuals Enraged Over MMM Leader’s Anti-Gay Sermon reinforces the notion that homophobic rants like that of Wilson are solely the problem of black gays and lesbians and thus their “outrage” can be easily dismissed. No Wilson’s rant is our problem…it’s my problem. One of the reasons why homophobia and misogyny continues to fester in our communities is because we reduce the targets of such practices as less than black, less than human. Homophobia and Sexism is not only divisive, they also deny us the fullness of our humanity and anything that denies any of us our humanity, needs to be put in check.

I’m done.

Read New Black Man.

So Can You Pass a Brother some Hot Sauce…and perhaps a Revolution?

So…members of the legendary Black Panther Party are preparing to sell a new line of products called Burn Baby Burn: A Taste of the Sixties Revolutionary Hot Sauce—yes I said hot sauce. Proceeds from the sale of the hot sauce (still ruminating on this?) will go towards the Huey Newton Foundation and Oakland based community organization. Now I know that so many of us have become jaded and look at the hot sauce venture with a healthy sense cynicism, but this is not new territory for members of the Black Panther Party. During the late 1980s BPP founder Bobby Seale began to hawk his skills as a master Bar BQer. His cook book (“it’s a cook book, it’s a cook book!”) Barbeque'N With Bobby was published in 1988. I remember catching Seale give a talk up at New York University shortly after the book’s publication, where he defended his right to write such a book on the basis that (and I’m of cousre paraphrasing), even a revolutionary has a right to eat good Bar BQ (keep in mind as I write this, I am across the street from a place called the Q-Shack which specializes to East Carolina-styled Bar BQ). It seems to me that if Elijah Muhammad could sell the masses of the diverse uses of navy beans, then Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party can celebrate the virtues of some good Bar-BQ and hot sauce.

Of the cousre the timing of “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce is not accidental. Next year marks the “formal’ birth of the Black Power Movement and the reality is that unless you are a hard-core fan/scholar/veteran of the era, names like David Hilliard, Mark Clark, Elaine Brown, Fred Hampton, Kathleen Clever and Bobby Hutton are not familiar names. At the very least, “Burn Baby Burn” gives us an opportunity to revisit that amazing moment in American history and at best, let’s hope the Huey Newton Foundation raises enough money to do the kind of work that lives up to the radical democratic ideals that the Black Panther Party tried to uphold.

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Just to Get a Rep?

I repped today on behalf of Hip-Hop parents on NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon. Danyel Smith also got down on a little Bliss