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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

9 Jul

There is a picture that always makes my momma smile. Her afro is well-sheened. Her lips are covered in red, her neck is adorned by one gold necklace, and then another, and then another. My daddy’s thick, hairy, brown hands grabs her by the waist.

He is behind her. His afro is well-sheened, almost as perfect as a picture can capture a moment that is in time but transcends it. His blue suit, as blue as the sky, is tight on his arms, and his white shirt is open at his chest, showing a bit of chest hair. He smiles.

My mother smiles back at him. I can hardly imagine how happy they must have been.

My mother’s hands are on top of my father’s. I think they are headed to prom, somewhere to dance, somewhere to get lost and be close. His thick, hairy, brown hands are at her waist. She smiles.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

9 Jul

What many people call "orthodoxy" and "biblical values" is just a way to maintain power and to mask to their insecurities, arrogance, limitations, and fears. James Baldwin is right: the passion with which many love the Lord "was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted".

And anytime our faith is rooted in fear, we will use God and theology as a justification for our love of power and control. Such a faith, Baldwin writes, hates "almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves." Jesus has nothing to do with theologies of hate.

"There was in the life I fled," he writes, "a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare." Baldwin didn't run from the church because he hated Jesus. Baldwin left the church because those who claimed Jesus failed at love.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

8 Jul

I keep thinking about this Ta-Nehisi Coates quote about his time at Howard University: “The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white.”

It reminds me so much of Kevin Quashie’s question, “what would it mean to consider black aliveness?” “To behold such aliveness,” he writes, “we have to imagine a black world…we have to imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death.”

Both Quashie and Coates remind me that we Black people are so much more than what has happened to us and what other’s think of us. Our world, the Black world, is a real world. It is full of beauty, and complexity, and tragedy, and poems, and beats, and balls, and bodies in dance.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

28 Jun

The resistance to critical race theory is connected to a long standing history of anti-literacies laws that expanded white supremacy and devalue Black humanity and liberation. Controlling and criminalizing curriculum has always been a device to protect white power.

At the heart is white people’s long standing fear that an educated and empowered Black person is a dangerous Black person. Don’t be fooled, just as anti-black practices and policies were happening back then, they are happening right now. It is about one thing: white power.

If they could have their way, reading, writing, and teaching for freedom would be illegal and suppressed (as they are trying to make it today). White resistance to Black education and liberation is not an aberration. It is the American norm.

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

27 Jun

Christian faith would be so much healthier if we didn’t see our faith as a war to be won or people as enemies but as worlds to be explored and people to be loved.

I can’t stop thinking about this Toni Cade Bambara quote: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?..Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

What if we saw our faith as joining Jesus in healing and liberating the world and not controlling it and condemning it?

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Danté Stewart (Stew)

@stewartdantec

26 Jun

I went home today, South Carolina. The country. My grandma and I talked about old church services, and how she can’t eat salt, and hospital bills. She also talked about my granddaddy, and dementia, how 61 years of marriage never prepared her for these last few years of hell.

The rain came and the rain went as we talked. “I want to keep him as long as I can,” she said, as she told me about conversations she be having about her home and putting him in a home and how home just don’t feel like home and hearts are broken and not there. “Yeah,” I say.

My grandad comes and turns the locked knob, me seeing him, him seeing me, through their old glass window which you can barely see through. “How many years y’all been living her grandma?” I ask. She pauses, fixing her dress. “I think since the 60s”, she says. “Yeah, the 60s.”

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