Evangelical Christians don’t have a Jesus problem, per se. They have a white supremacy problem. They have a hatred problem. They have a capitalism problem. They have a homophobia problem. They have an arrogance problem. Jesus is just the vehicle. White supremacy is the driver. In James Baldwin’s last known publication in 1987, just about a month before he died, you know what he chose to address? The way Christians we’re using and weaponizing Christianity for bigotry, arrogance, and hatred. THE LAST ONE. That’s what he chose. And little has changed.

I was reading the gospels and more than once, Jesus had to correct the disciples when they were arguing. In one instance it was about what they couldn’t do and who wasn’t like them — their addiction to visibility and power. I imagine Jesus has to correct us today as well. As Christianity was passed down through the ages, much of the faith and tradition moved from justice, mercy, and family to power, violence, and control. Scriptures where Jesus corrected unhealthy ways were evaded and replaced with an image of a warrior and fighter.

The greatest threat to Christianity is not secularity. It is certainty. When you are so convinced that you are right, then you will create all types of enemies and cut yourself off from all the ways God is active in another person's experience. I am reminded of the gospel story where Jesus had to correct the disciples who were complaining about someone doing good work but not like them. For them, their proximity to Jesus blinded them to God’s power in someone not as close. A tragic thing faith can do to us.

My driver picks me up this morning. About 30 mins into the drive he asks what I do. “I’m a writer,” I say. “Have you ever heard of Thomas Sowell?” I laugh. He begins going on a long right-wing diatribe. Fox News is playing in the background. Whiteness is exhausting. Truly. He was sure to tell me about his black friends, how Martin Luther King Jr is his hero, why black people need to offer solutions, why he wouldn’t trade places with black people, why we need to just stop talking about race, and more. At 7 am in the morning.

I was getting coffee with my daughter this morning. A white woman saw us, came over to us and said, “ohhhh, whose child did you steal.” I laughed and said, “only white people can steal other people’s kids and act like they’re theirs.” She grabbed her coffee and left. It never fails: at least once a week, when I’m out with my children, some white person says some foolishness. Ol’ girl the other week, touched my velvet shirt and said, “I love this. I just want to pet you.” Like what.

If you are 30 or older and you not “where I’m supposed to be”, I see you, am rooting for you, proud of you, and love you. I want to affirm your goodness, your right to feel what you feel, and believing with you for the future you imagine for yourself. It is okay to be sad, envious, jealous, regretful, angry, exhausted, and whatever else you feel in this season.

I am praying after all you feel, you come home to yourself and treat that person with kindness, revisit you goal board, and take one more step again.

I didn’t know when I wrote this essay months ago, themes of grief, memory, and anger would be more pressing now than it was back then.

Here’s my first—and I think my best—essay with @oxfordamerican on James Baldwin, exhaustion, and the power of presence.

oxfordamerican.org/web-only/littl… I wrote about aspects of James Baldwin’s life and production—especially in the midst of so much grief and death—that really haunts me. He is active, like so many of us, and I don’t know if he knew what it cost him.

oxfordamerican.org/web-only/littl…

I think this country needs a national day of mourning—to express both the anger and sadness at the world we live in. I know it won’t change much. But I do wish the world would just stop long enough for us to feel, cry, and express the emotions that are buried. We are not okay. Like I know live in a racist, capitalist society, the last thing on the mind of those in power is pausing to love on people. They legit hate us and us being well. But I do long for a day where we can hold one another, put down the production, and just cry. And cry. And cry.

In moments of racial terrorism and injustice, I think one of the most powerful things about faith is its emphasis on liberation, repair, and justice being necessary to social healing and wholeness. In times of hatred, my theology tells me to fight back and tend to the soul. Some believe that faith makes us passive and docile. For some, it does. In truth, for some, their faith gives justification for terrorism and hatred. For me, being a student of liberation theology, womanist theology, and black literature, I choose freedom over passive acceptance.

White college coaches have benefitted from black talent for years. They have built their wealth and their family's wealth off our skills. They have been able to gain unmatched power. It is the height of white arrogance to now get mad when we start benefiting ourselves. If I'm honest, college football has always been a racist institution that has allowed white people to basically create a system of sharecropping, gaining the most in the end, convincing us that a scholarship was something we should be "grateful" for.

White Christians are not representative of "Christianity" and white people aren't the "Church". To believe that, and to write stories where that narrative is centered, continue to repeat the racist lie that whiteness matters more. DO BETTTER!!!!!! 😡

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… Like, y'all been writing the same story for so long. At least 2014. "White Evangelicals struggle with BLM." "Will Evangelicals choose Jesus or Trump?" Like really? How many times, especially those of us who have written on this, have to have OUR stories erased?

I was reading in my devotion this morning. I was reading Paul's words in the Corinthian letters. It hit me: So many of us Christians have harmed people in the name of "belief". Belief should never matter more than love. God is love and liberation. To take Paul seriously when he says that our faith is seeing through a glass darkly, is also to see that our faith is a journey of discovery not a means of control. We never want to get to a place where we’re so arrogant as to believe there’s no room to grow.

Just a few weeks ago, as my grandmother and I sat at my kitchen table, and saying something like "your grandaddy and I used to go on coffee dates at Hardees", she grabs the card that reads "prompt" and says: It's going to give me something to look forward to. I'm going to write. And then I smile a little, as she takes another long sip of the coffee that has cooled a bit, the cracks of her eighty-nine year old finger gripping that curve of the mug in ways I imagine she gripped the cracks of Jonney's hands. She smiles back at me.

I have given the better part of the last years doing work on James Baldwin. I’m so happy today that this essay is in the world. Here is my latest with ⁦@CNN⁩ ⁦@CNNOpinion⁩ on Baldwin’s words on love, faith, and Easter. I’m proud of this one! cnn.com/2022/04/16/opi… I want to say a word about this piece. First, I have to give many thanks to @SonofBaldwin who helped guide my mind and thoughts through the writing of it. We’ve been having conversations on Baldwin for months now. He pushed me to the places I needed. Big love to him!

And when we do, we can’t be shamed and blamed in the process but do that work of love together. Self-shame and self-blame makes self-love and liberation impossible. For the many black men that are harmful and toxic, there are so many us who work for healing and transformation.

https://twitter.com/DEVandtheCITY/status/1514305238899040264

If I’m honest, I have been so grieved at the ways we talk to and live with one another—I mean so many of us black men and black women. We say we want healing and love but make each feel like we have to lose or be killed in the process. That’s not love. That’s hate.

One thing that’s going around in my mind is how powerful trauma can be in our lives and how trauma + patriarchy can turn us into terrible things. I’m mostly thinking about the joke, the hit, Denzel talking and then Will laughing with P. Diddy after it all. I’m shook and confused. I’m not into the whole morality talk right now. “Who is right or who is wrong?” still doesn’t get at what is going on. We have to talk about it all: black women’s vulnerability, black men, trauma, and patriarchy, the history between people, and elder intervening. All of it.

I was reading in the gospels. "The Pharisees came and began to argue with him," Mark writes, "asking him for a sign." Jesus's responded by sighing deeply and then left. It is as if he is saying: you can't invest in some who just want to argue rather than love. Those whose faith needs enemies and arguments to feel powerful are people whose faith is rooted in insecurity and control. They would rather exploit than be inclusive. They would rather be arrogant than humble. They would rather live in lies than be set free.

It is better, as the Bible says, to stand with the marginalized and oppressed than to argue with the foolish and powerful. I made a promise to myself back in 2018 that I was never arguing again on social media. I have kept that promise. People come to my social media everyday just to feel better about themselves by arguing. I just ignore it. My health and art matters more than their insecurity.

I’ve been thinking so much about Ryan Coogler. Not just about what happened but also about how it makes him feel and what he, and so many, have to relive. Black people don’t have to be perfect to be at peace. Here’s what I wrote with ⁦@andscape_⁩. andscape.com/features/for-a… “In a span of 22 minutes, Coogler had been questioned, detained, blamed, erased, silenced, and then humiliated.
Perhaps that’s what I can’t get out of my head and what really breaks my heart: the humiliation.”

andscape.com/features/for-a…

“We love black women,” they say. It’s sad that we live in a country that cares more about black women’s performance and production than it does about their personhood and protection. It’s sad that so many of us learn to be near black women but we fail to actually love black women.

It’s so ironic that so many white Christians have no problem saying God is on the side of America but have a problem with saying God is on the side of the oppressed of that God is a black woman. Their problem isn’t God. Their problem is white supremacy. In fact, their problem is God. When your ideas of God is shaped by white, blue-eyed, conservative men, then you will always want to control ideas about God and justify terrible theologies toward others.