Episode 15: Airmail Special

Hello Beloveds.

A big part of the delight, and the challenge, of hosting a podcast during what I like to call The Great Reveal is… I never know how the world will behave by the time the podcast goes live. I never know what court decisions will come down, I never know who will be in the news for what, I never know what kind of weather patterns will prove inconvenient at best to deadly at their worst.

At the time that I am editing this podcast, I’m running up against an idea that I think bears addressing here.

Should we be surprised by the recent decision to allow Kyle Rittenhouse to go free?

Even in that statement, we legitimize the prison system as a place where bad people go. Even on its own terms, we get stuck in the sticky fly trap of depending on a morally depraved nation to indict itself. When we study our history, we realize that laws are designed to empower and financially sustain rich White people and criminalize the rest of us. By the time Kyle gets to the court system, there is no right thing to do, here.

But I’m noticing a wave of a sentiment that looks down on people articulating their sadness and anger. A wave that says, “Are YOU surprised?”

Which I think is very different from someone saying, for themselves, “I’m not surprised.”

I have fallen into this trap myself; being confused at other people’s disappointment and shock. Shaking my head and saying, “what the hell did yall think was gonna happen?”

But over time, I think shock and disappointment is useful, because it can help “the uninitiated” reorient their end goal.

In 2014, some classmates from Union Seminary and I went to Ferguson for a weekend effort called Ferguson October. And I will always say, that weekend changed my life. The people of Ferguson lived there for more than a weekend and have been continuously exposed to some of the worst human rights violations that the modern age has seen. To this day, the people are terrorized by surveillance, and traumatic memories of how this nation chose to align with Evil rather than the People.

And of course there are financial and economic consequences people are still bearing to this day. Josh Williams is still in prison.

When I was there, I was shocked and disappointed. To the extent that I was hurt. Disillusioned. I had always known that this nation was not what it should have been. I remember protesting for Trayvon Martin, I remember the feelings of hopelessness for Troy Davis. I remember being in elementary school when people at my home church went to engage in civil disobedience in response to the shooting of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD.

There’s knowing in your mind and then there’s knowing in your body.

So to see a line of riot cops beating on their shields rhythmically, for no other reason than to intimidate protesters, changed me. Any shred of hope that I had, that cops could be helpful or useful, dissolved there. This was psychological intimidation. To the point where, months later, the water would drip in my shower and I would see those very cops. I could not believe what I saw. And though I had been to protests, and done the reading, this was a moment when my feelings changed me.

I think people need to be shocked and disappointed. Which is different from being traumatized. But I think something about this moment should push you to say, “this is absolutely absurd.”

It’s interesting to think that just a year ago, many were looking towards the inauguration of Biden and Harris as an opportunity to “go back to normal.” I think it’s important that even with a Democratic President and all these exciting Democratic senators and congresspeople, here we are. And it’s interesting to see people, still, to this day, proclaim that voting is what fixes this alone. But Alice Walker called it in 2016. I’m paraphrasing, but she said, “how dare we think that someone else will carry out the work as we vote and then drive off to the mall?”

Yall, it’s so hard to organize under Democrats. We can’t even agree on the problem, let alone its antidote.

This is a moment that is revealing. Illuminating. And this is a moment when people can be caught. This is such a prime moment for not just mobilization, but education.

I want to take people’s questions seriously. When people say, “how could they let this happen?” I want us to have room to explore and answer it. Political education is so important and I think it can make our movements much stronger.

If you are having questions, I think you should give yourself room to have them. And link up with other people who are feeling similarly. These questions of hopelessness and anger are important.

The Chopping Board

Greedy people believe they are the only ones on this planet.

God is not exceptionally delighted by greed, even if we call it “hustling.”

When I am confused by exploitation, I am in the company of the Divine.

I need a community of accountability that won’t let my pursuits turn exploitative.

Today’s text comes from Psalm 14 verses 1-7.

1 Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;

there is no one who does good.

2 The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind

to see if there are any who are wise,

who seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;

there is no one who does good,

no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers

who eat up my people as they eat bread,

and do not call upon the Lord?

5 There they shall be in great terror,

for God is with the company of the righteous.

6 You would confound the plans of the poor,

but the Lord is their refuge.

Fish Sandwich

Airmail Special

One year during the Concord Freedom School, we were studying human rights. During debrief, an intern shared a story from her classroom. She said that as her class was surveying a list of 30 human rights, one student was confused. He raised his hand, and in his own flustered and curious way, and said, “how can there be 30 human rights? There are billions of people on the planet?”

Taking a moment to analyze the gap in understanding, the intern lovingly reminded the student, “No, these are rights are for everyone to have. It’s not that each person gets one personal right to themselves.”

I think that child might have been onto something.

Sometimes, I do feel like there are billions of people competing for just 30 individual human rights.

According to Forbes, total billionaire wealth is about $4.6 trillion dollars, as of the stock market close on April 28. Which means, you can expect it’s more by now. Because one thing about billionaires… They don’t have tough times. Not financially.

Forbes estimates that the U.S. American billionaires have gotten about 1.2 trillion dollars richer during the pandemic.

We will always have needs for Black flight attendants. Black Morticians. I need Black doctors. I need Black plumbers. I need Black teachers. I need Black fashion designers. Black writers. Black chefs. Black sanitation workers.

But what we will NEVER have need for is a Black Billionaire. And trust me, as a Beyonce enthusiast, those words are hard to say. Y’all pray for me because the cognitive dissonance even in my own political commitments and lived practices are visible. I hope no one listening believes that Candace is a Moral Authority. Baby please do not copy me, okay. What did Paul say? Imitate me as I imitate christ? Why don't we just skip the middleman and yall just imitate Christ (or someone else) and ignore me thank you very much, God bless you.

What do we do, when we find ourselves among the billions of people and with very few rights?

Let us look no further than this wisdom text.

Fools say in their hearts, there is no God. They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good. I think what matters most here are the action verbs. There’s a specific description of what a fool does. It is not atheism that makes people ungodly. It is the corrupt and abominable deeds. I am helped daily by the witness of Black atheists, Black agnostics, Black Muslims, Black Jews, and practitioners of various African diasporic religions and traditions.

It is not a lack of faith in a Christian God that makes someone abominable.

What makes someone abominable is that they do abominable deeds. I had to look this word up because I have two reference points for it.

First, The Abominable Snowman, a legend of a humanlike, hairy, beast that lives at the edges of the Himalayan mountains. The legend became more sensationalized when nosy British explorers went on an expedition. The local guides referred to the legend as “man-bear snow-man,” but the journalist reporting on this mistranslated the local language and instead used the word “abominable.” He thought that word sounded better anyway.

A warning, when outsiders come to study you, they will make up their own words for what you have already named. You know they’re walking around calling the intersection of Bed Stuy and Bushwick, bedWick, right? Nobody calls it that. Why y’all making stuff up?!

But the other context I have for the word “abomination,” is the list of things people have named as an abomination before God. And chances are, if you are Black and you stand in the right place at the right time, you will be called an abomination yourself.

If you have been known to have sex, as evidenced by a child before marriage? Abomination.

You’re queer? Abomination?

Trans? Abomination.

Struggling with mental health challenges? Addicted to some substance? Abomination.

Christians have a way of labeling things and people they cannot control as abominations, thus rendering the word itself useless. But here in this text, Abomination is something to be abhorred, and detested in the ethical sense.

Do you remember how you felt as you watched Jeff Bezos and Company launch into space while streets, bridges and condos collapse right here on Earth? When front-line workers were dying, because there was no other way to make money to keep the house, to keep the apartment, in a pandemic. What you are seeing, was an abomination. Something Disgusting. Something weary-making.

And again, It’s important for us to hold the Christian Church accountable for the ways this word “abomination” is selectively weaponized. Abomination is not a synonym for gay people. That’s not an abomination. An Abomination is not your niece sharing new pronouns with you at the dinner table and asking if you can take her shopping for clothes. It’s not an abomination for someone to have children before they are married. It’s not gonna bother or hurt YOU if you mind your business. It’s not an abomination to have a disability, to be poor, to be undocumented, to be Black and proud.

You know what will hurt AND bother you EVEN when you mind your business?

Gentrification and lack of quality housing. Even if you do everything right, even if you mind your business, it is still nearly impossible to find a decent, dignified, safe one bedroom apartment for the wages we earn today. Ask me how I know.

And gentrification is held up by people who, as the psalmist would say, are “all alike perverse.” It’s enough to make you think, as the Psalmist declares, that “there is no one who does good, no, not one.” Nobody got it together!

This confuses even God. The psalmist is confused and So is GOD. Even God “looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God.”

If you haven’t had the chance yet, I highly recommend the documentary, Summer of Soul on Hulu. It’s about a music festival that took place in Harlem in 1969. The thing that stood out most to me was the assembly of all these beautiful Black people. And how much I wish for something like that again.

There was such incredible footage of some of our favorite singers and artists. And it was genre bending. Gospel, funk, r&b, soul, rock, jazz. To see BB King, The Edwin Hawkins Singers, Fifth Dimension, The Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder. A reminder that your elders did more than go to church and read their bibles.

In the background, the Staples Singers are singing about a man on the moon. Because of course during this huge music festival in Harlem, a man did land on the moon! I think the documentary did an excellent job to show white people reacting to the landing, all of whom were impressed by the technological advancement. But at the festival, Black People were asked what they thought of the moon landing. And people had such incisive comments.

A news correspondent says, “for many of those gathered for the Harlem Cultural festival, this is far more relevant than a man landing on the moon.

“The cash they wasted could be used to feed poor Black folks in Harlem right here.”

“People are going hungry all over the United States.”

“Let’s do something about poverty.”

“There are so many people who need help.”

“What's up there on the moon?”

Moms Mabley is doing a set, “a man went to the moon, I went as far as Baltimore and then I got off.”

The problem with Jeff Bezos or NASA going to space isn’t that space is unworthy of exploration. Space is a place that We as Black people have studied. Sun Ra knows. We went to space when we studied the stars and charted out maps to freedom from slavery. We went to space every time Raven Baxter saw into the future and when she was in the satellite with Zenon. When Dorothy went to Oz and met Richard Pryor and got a concert from Lena Horne. When we went to Wakanda. Mae Jemison did us all proud when she went to space, and she did so inspired by Nichelle Nichols playing Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, who was encouraged to stay on set by none other than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Black people know space. Regular people know space.

The problem is that Jeff Bezos, and so many others who run the businesses that run our lives, believe that there is nothing higher than they are. Bezos sees no issue going to space at the same time that he pays his workers pennies. He sees no issue going to space while he refuses to pay taxes. In fact, it is because he pays workers pennies and doesn’t pay taxes, that he has the money to go to space.

People like him do not believe in a higher power, because THEY are the higher power. Bezos and others believe that they are God. Higher than God.

It is easy to read this passage and believe that the problem is atheists. But let’s be real and let’s be honest.

Because there are a lot of Christians making an ungodly mess on this Earth, supposedly inspired by a God they are trying to mimic. Those colonizers who first came to the land that would be violently renamed as the United States of America used all the imagination that God gave them, all the tools that God gave them, all the natural resources that God gave them, and decided to come up with the most inhumane way of treating our ancestors.

All that curiosity and imagination, and what did you do with it? They figured out how to pack our people into ship bottoms, stacked us like cattle, made mathematical equations for how many of us should start on the journey because inevitably many of us will die before we reach our destination.

All that curiosity and imagination, and what do we do with it? We find new ways to build technology that imprisons us. New ways to make jails even more dehumanizing. New ways to surveil and arrest Black teens at the turnstile who hop because they don’t have a Metrocard. New ways to be so remarkably creative, and yet, we behave as though we don’t know God.

But lest you believe that this is just for someone else. I want us to search our own heart. Search your own actions. When was the last time you did something in public that would have it appear as though we don’t know god?

Search your own hearts. How many times have we come RIGHT out of church, and the first thing we do is cuss someone out for cutting us off at the intersection? Or get snappy with the barista for messing up our order? How many of us love to worship, and then find ourselves being dishonest with people we say we love? How many of us have spent all night in bible study, then turn around and give an attitude to the people who are in our houses? What kind of advertisement are we for a Good and Loving God?

I do have a lot of smoke for billionaires today, but if all you hear today is that Jeff Bezos is the devil, I haven’t done my job. It is BECAUSE Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the rest of them exist that we have to be even more mindful of how we treat each other. We cannot be each other’s bullies.

A lot of people talk about Black on Black crime, and I think that phrase doesn’t quite get at the root of the issue. We can, however, talk about intracommunal harm.

We don’t need to be each other’s worst nightmares. There’s enough bullies on the playground and in the Forbes 500. The most revolutionary thing we can do is to protect the vulnerable among us.

So what do you do, when it seems as though every time you turn around, something else in the house has to be fixed, and another child needs another set of braces, and another bill keeps finding itself at your doorstep before the check does?

Send your bill Airmail Special.

When Jeff Bezos went into space, a poem by GIl Scott-Heron went viral. I do think his art was prophetic because it speaks to the conditions we endure even today. In 1970, he wrote this poem, called Whitey on the Moon. It was written after the US astronaut landing on the moon in 1969. I will change a few words. And I’m gonna change a few words. In your own devotional period, please do watch Scott-Heron perform this piece himself. I’ll link in the transcript.

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Bezos on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.

(but Walmart on the moon)

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.

(while McDonalds on the moon)

The man jus' upped my rent las' night.

('cause Whitey's on the moon)

No hot water, no toilets, no lights.

(but Kardashians are on the moon)

I wonder why he's uppi' me?

('cause Google’s on the moon?)

I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.

(with Starbucks on the moon)

Taxes takin' my whole check,

Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,

The price of food is goin' up,

An' as if all that stuff wasn't enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Big Pharma on the moon)

Her face an' arm began to swell.

(but the US Military on the moon)

Was all that money I made las' year

(for Facebook-Meta on the moon?)

How come ain't no money here?

(Hm! Enron’s on the moon)

Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill

(of Whitey on the moon)

I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,

Airmail special

(to Bezos on the moon)

Every word in this poem pierces the lie of US exceptionalism as our religion. How is it that we want the world to praise us for our scientific exploits, and people don’t have healthcare? Is that not science? Is that not a mark of a civilized society?

The psalmist reminds us that the evildoers will eat up God’s people just as they eat bread. Eugene Peterson translates these verses in this way,

“Night is coming for them, and nightmares,

for God takes the side of victims.

Do you think you can mess

with the dreams of the poor?

You can’t, for God

makes their dreams come true.”

If God does live in the sky, God has seen the tip of an Amazon-branded spaceship attempt to pierce the outer limits of space. The spaceship would have probably rattled God’s apartment building and maybe God peeked through the clouds and curtains wondering “what kinda mess is going on outside?”

God looks down and wonders, what the HAYLE are y'all doing down there?

But God does not live in the sky. God is around. God is among us. God is with us. God is on Earth looking into the sky confused, just like us.

Don’t let these demons convince you that you can be like them. They’ll tell you, “work hard, and one day you can go to space like me!” Ain't enough hours at Wendy’s to get me a mansion, cuz it’s barely enough hours to get me a studio, and they know that.

Don’t let these demons convince you that you are unworthy of having your needs met. Whether you work, or not. Whether you’re on disability, or not. Whether you're on fixed income, on parental leave, in between jobs, working 4 jobs, consulting, about to retire, in school, about to quit, whatever your circumstance is, you are deserving of daily bread. If we have learned nothing else during this pandemic, it is that we are all safer when our neighbors are well. What does it profit us to hold all the sanitizer? Don't you want people out in the street to have sanitizer too, if for no other reason than, more people with sanitizer means less germs that can make their way to you?

I am thankful for that young Freedom School Scholar who opened up so much for me. There are times when I feel like one of 8 billion people grasping for a limited amount of rights. There are times when I feel like I might not ever be able to put down roots in the very city that made me. There are times I just look out into the world and I can’t imagine it will get better. I know I’m not the only one.

BUT. The Lord Is their refuge. That’s what the Psalmist says.

Thousands of years ago, someone thought enough to say, BUT.

But the Lord is our refuge..

The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

It’s human to get disoriented. It’s human to feel like you’re making things up. It’s human to feel like you’ve been forgotten. In so many ways, we have been.

But God has not forgotten about us. And there will come a day when every tear shall be wiped away. Death and exploitation will be no more. Mourning and crying and moving money back and forth across accounts will be no more.

I have enough evidence to suggest that this is a silly dream. But if we can put a man on the moon and a computer in our pockets, I believe we can do so much more.

To Go Bag

Take a deep breath.

Think back to some of the earliest lessons you received about money. What were you taught, either implicitly or explicitly, about money? What do you believe about money? Fill in this sentence:

When people are rich, it’s because_____.

There are no wrong answers, because this is a reflection question. Getting clarity about what our assumptions are about money helps us orient our attention in the right direction.

Okay beloveds we have one more episode left and then we’ll come back in the new year. The folks at Porshanality Media, and Candace, will be on break. In the meantime, please do follow us on Twitter at @FishSandwichH and on instagram at @FishSandwichHeaven, and you can also like us on Facebook. If you’d like to drop a line or support the podcast, the contact tab can help you do all of that.

Also, I’m not at all sponsored by this show, I just came here to evangelize. But if you’re looking for a sweet show to watch, please get into the Wonder Years reboot. Every person on the cast is not only stunning but super believable as a member of the Williams family. I’m really enjoying the ways each episode deals with human emotions. TOP TIER show. I’m really liking how each episode demonstrates how saturated we are by racism/sexism without coming off as preachy. The characters feel familiar. Every week I just find myself so mushy. They had one episode touching on vulnerability and asking for help, and just how embarrassing it can be to need someone when you’re supposed to Know It All. So, I’m telling my business but I’m not.

That’s all for this week, LoveBugs. See you in two weeks. Stay moisturized. Turn that humidifier on for the sake of your respiratory systems, hair and skin, and thank me later! God Bless!