That oftentimes we compare ourselves with the worst in ourselves and the best in other people. And when we do that, we will always look down on our journey. We will always diminish how much we've changed. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dante Stewart, a theologian, essayist, and cultural crack. His work has appeared on CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. Dante received his b A and sociology from Clemson University and is currently studying at the Chandler School of Theology at Emery University in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Dante and Eric discussed his book Shouting in the Fire An American Epistle. Hey Dante, welcome to the show. Hey,
what's up, man, It's good to be with you. We're gonna be talking about your book Shouting in the Fire An American Epistle, among other things. But before we do that, let's start, like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent talking with a grand child and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always in battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which represents
things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up with their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, wow, that is actually a great, great parable. And the immediate thing that comes to mind is back in college at Clumpson University, where a similar story was
told about investment. About whatever investment that we make in our bodies and in our minds and the things that we're doing outside in the world is eventually going to come out. And whichever one gets fed the most is the one who's going to endure the longest. So we think about running. I just got finished working out cycling. Actually I just got finished cycling, And whenever I'm cycling, it's always like that. My ability to be strong long is dependent on what I ate thirty minutes ago, people
what I ate an hour ago. And so when I hear that parable, particularly around the work that I'm doing across theology and and black literature, and politics and and gender and sexuality and and many of these intersecting topics. I want to feed the one that's going to create the greatest community. I don't want to feed the wolf that's going to destroy everybody. I want to feed the wolf that's going to create a community of care. So that's kind of where my mind goes Awesome, that's a
lovely answer. So I want to start off. There's a question that you pose early in the book that I think sits at the heart of the work you're doing. But I think a different version of it sits in the heart of the work all of us do it anyway in our life. Right, And you say that, I wonder to myself, how do I be black and Christian and American? Right, and that, you know, trying to be all three of those things and and then calling different
things out of you. And I think we could add mail to that, right, male as a whole whole element. You know, we might have listeners who are like, well, what's it like to be black and atheist and female? And we each have these different identities. I think that may sort of call to us in different ways. And I'm just curious how you think about being a whole person that balances all those different identities, particularly if they're
calling for different things from you. Yeah, yeah, incredible question.
My mind. Immediity goes to tone Uet Bombarba's The Salt Eaters, which was a fantastic, fantastic novel, which is the story of a woman who is very much engaged in the struggle for liberation, but she finds herself in the psychiatric ward at the beginning of the book, and she's in this community of healers who have disability to heal people, and there at the beginning of the book, there is the question that is asked, again and again and again, are you sure you want to be wail? Because healing
the wholeness ain't no trifling matter. And one of the things that I love about this book, and I have been just sitting with this book and sitting really with Tony cab and Bar for a long time now, is that, you know, there's a difference between doing creative and compelling work and actually being a good and healthy human being.
You know, some people are really good at what they do, and they may do it very well, but oftentimes in the process they destroy themselves and others in the process because they don't know how to integrate various aspects of what it means to be a whole and healthy human being in what they're doing. And for me, I've made that mistake in the past, and I have to continually be aware of my own limitations as it relates to
my work. Right now, I think about my family, I think about being in ministry, I think about being a writer and a student, and then somebody who's trying to do work in public. So many of these roles are calling me in various different directions that it's very easy to burn out, is very easy to allow insecurity, to win out, is very easy to work from a place of imbalance. Is very easy to be resentful and even regretful in ways that I failed, in ways that I
missed and fumbled the bag in the past. And I have to constantly remind myself of why I do this work that I do. I do it, as Baldwin said in is Far Next time, I do it because I love us, I love myself. I want all of us uh to be whole and healthy. And back to your initial question of that what sits at the heart of my book is that question what does it mean to be Black, American and Christian? And it is really a nod to Ardrew Lord, the black lesbian feminist poet, a
mother who she self described herself. As she writes in Zombie, a new spelling to my name around page one seventy one seventy six, something like that, she says, I remember what it is like to be young and black and gay and lonely. And she goes and separates those various experiences not with a Comma, but with the word and and it's as if she's suggesting that one needs to take into account what these various particularities in my identity mean and the ways in which they intersect in the
most beautiful and terrible ways possible. Then she goes on and says that we had to create various models. We had to create communities of love and accountability and responsibility and wholeness because we had no models. We had people who rejected us. And in those various experience we had people who let us down and filled us. And we have to find a way to show up in the world as our full and whole self instead of simply
being reminded of what other people did to us. And so me, when I think about wholeness and healing and shotting in the Fire and American Epistle, it is that journey continually not trying to be the hero, but trying to find ways to be whole and healthy as a human person. A beautiful answer. There's so many things you
sit in there I could touch on. It reminded me of a line in your book A little Bit where you say, as a writer, I came to the realization that far more important than people liking my work or even resonating with my work, or even using my work to shake things up. Was me liking myself and liking the complexity of life and believing that I had something
worth giving that was saturated in maturity and love. And I love that last idea because any of those identities we wanted, any of those identities we take or that we inherit or whatever, if we bring to them that idea of maturity and love, then that feels to me
like a lot of the battle. Oh yeah. And I think inside of our work that we do, of trying to offer you say, in your platform, practical wisdom for a better life, or in my space, me trying to create a world of love and liberation, where in some sense my kind of sprain board is at the intersection of Jesus and James ball Went Black, literagy and theology. It's very easy to allow that work or that platform or whatever that is to mask who we really are,
you know. It's it's easy to allow those things to allow us to run from ourselves. As I know in the book that whether I was in the Orange Jersey or whether I was reading theology, or whether I was preaching, teaching, leading in these spaces. These spaces allowed me opportunity to run from myself, or run from other people, or run from where I became, or in some sense made me
the hero in the process. And I think at the heart of so much of the running is insecurity and fear that says that if people know me for who I really am, if people hear the whole story of what I actually have become, then they will not accept me in my full self, and they will reject me
for who I want to become. And so much of our work, so much of this kind of growing up that we need to do, must be saturated in maturity to realize that off the times we compare ourselves with the worst in ourselves and the best in other people, and when we do that, we will always look down on our journey. We will always diminish how much we've changed.
And we would try and prove to people that what they are projecting on us, or what they remember about us in the past, is actually who we really were when the actuality that is just one part of the journey, and it made us who we are today, and the fullness of that story is everything that came before and everything that happened in between. Yeah, that's awesome, very well said.
I think it's time that we pivot a little bit to your story, because I think it's an important part of the book, and I particularly want to focus in on kind of where you start. The book primarily is really around the fact, and I'm gonna I'm gonna set it up a little bit for listeners, and you correct
me if I get anything wrong. You grew up in the rural sal Pentecostal and then you went off to Clemson University to be a football player, and while that was happening, you began to get involved with, for lack of a better word, the white church. I'll let you kind of pick it up from there, kind of share a little bit about what was pulling you in that direction, and then we can sort of talk about your movement away from that, and then, um, I think that leads
into a lot of other areas we can go here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at this moment this was in I was rising leader in this predominant white church, and by that time, in two thousand sixteen, I had already graduated from Clemson.
I was very much invested in white evangelicalism through college where we come onto campus as young black athletes, and the ones who have greatest access to us when you're thinking about like wisdom and spirituality and maturity and vocation, those who are shaping those ideas and those ideals are those who are white. When you think about preaching and things, we should be involved. And it wasn't during that moment
thinking about the injustice that was around us. Of course, uh, those as my teammates were concerned about those injustices, particularly when I tell the story about Treyvon Martin, and my team may stand in solidarity with him, but me a
line said, I had work to do. Uh. So there were definitely moments and movements, uh that that wanted to take seriously the suffering that black people were enduring and trying to liberate us from the the kind of enduring structures of white supremacy that we're so pervasive in every aspect of our society. But in a very real way, that wasn't an overwhelming thing. It was more so like, you're here to play football, and you're here to get an education and everything else you know you need to.
It's like that the idea of the blinders. You need to leave all the noise when in actuality we never took into account, but we were missing when we had such exum and zero sum focus. And for me, so much of what I was missing was the wisdom and the love and the art and the culture that came
from my black Pentecostal real upbringing. When I was at Clemson, so much of it was me seeing whiteness is something to be desired and bringing me protection and bringing me resources and bringing me things that my parents and people around where I came from said was gonna make me successful. Now, over time, I started to believe it, and I started to get invested and get involved, and it changed how our names saw and showed up in the world. You know.
Steady suggests that the longer people of color and black people are within these white dominant spaces, the more we individualize our racial identity uh and the less we identify
with our people that we come from. And so what tends to happen is the longer we're in those spaces, the more we're socialized out of where we come from and socialized into an environment that oftentimes want us to seem mel lay in ways that that does not question the dominant power structures, that does not question the stories
at work within these spaces. So two thousand sixteen happened for London Castile and Alton Sterling is murdered, and it shook me up out of the ways in which I had devalue where I come from and distanced myself from the people that I came from. And then Donald Trump happened, and I'm reaching teaching leading, and so many of these white members in this church were not just apathetic to our identities and our experiences, but they actually was actively hostile.
And so that just wasn't for the members, that was also for the leaders. And so then in that moment, I had a decision I had to make. Either I stay and assimilate and be silent and it eats me up on the inside and I felt myself and my wife and my friends and very legitimate ways, or I make the more courageous decision to actually change and do something about the reality that I knew was harming all
of us. There's so many things you write in the book about this that I think are so powerful, and I think what you're describing, we're framing it in the context of black and white, and that's an important part
of your story and all that. And I think as a human experience, there is a you grow up, you kind of move away from what you were raised, you want to learn something new, you're looking for something else, You lose touch, you know, and there's this reckoning that goes on inside of us right between like how I was raised and who I am now and what I
believe now. And I think that's that's so interesting. Of course, yours was amplified by the fact that you sort of suddenly realized, like, oh, I'm in a space that's hostile towards my people, you know. And I'm curious to the extent that you sort of knew where you were and you really wanted to be there and you were willing to overlook a lot of things, or to the extent that you were surprised and you went, Holy mackerel, like some of this ugliness is coming out of the cupboard.
And it's probably a little bit of both, but you say a little more about that. I definitely think that that's very perceptive. Actually, so much of my story is
that tension of I'm not making myself the hero. I actually wanted to be there, and I write in a book that I had become a weapon, and it was a weapon that was always used against us, the black US, or any marginalized community, whether you're talking about black women, you're talking about l g B t Q. This idea of being white, conservative, evangelical male as like fundamentally Christian, that this this idea of listening to that voice as the dominant voice for how I thought about the world
harm so many people. And I desired it because it brought me so much of what I was longing for, and that was affirmation. And me and my friend was talking to some time ago one of my teammates and he was like, yo, bro, Like we all live for this one thing when we playing ball, and it's to hear from the coach, great job, I see you, You're
doing great. We're living literally in and day out for that final affirmation at the end of every day, at the end of each game, at the end of each week, at the end of each year, great job, yo, You're doing amazing, etcetera, etcetera. Now, when you speak to amplification, I think when we start taking into account social identities and affirmation, especially within the context of giving injustice around experiences of race, class, gender, sexuality, place ability, etcetera, etcetera.
This kind of affirmation and assimilation is amplified, and we long for these things because you know, these people in some sense have the ability to determine whether I stay here and go beyond or whether I go back home. And one of the things we didn't want from where I grew up is to go back home, because it was almost like a metaphorical death sentence to go back home. And so, like so many young people that I was around,
we live for the affirmation. And so inside of this white evangelical space, that affirmation came, and it came again and again and again. And I want people to understand. I don't want people to be unaware that YO, to be young and black and male and straight and charismatic is to be marketable in these white spaces, especially if you don't say anything about you know, oppression and justice, gender sexuality, even how we think about the world and
culture and cultural production. You know, we're very marketable. And it's not until we start to push back against these dominant stories that we realize that these spaces only one us insofar as we make them feel good about who they are or what they're doing. Case in point, Colin Kaepernick, case in point, many of the black women who stand up against this injustice in the NBA. I'm thinking about
Maya Moore, uh. Case in point. Uh, we see black gay men, black gay women standing up against the dominant forms in which even we black men and up whole patriarchy. Uh. And so when when you started thinking about this silencing and this assimilation and things like that, and just the ways in which is amplified, especially for me, in this space, I started to see that I was actually full to desire this space. I was shaped to desire this space.
It didn't naturally happen this space called me to that desire, called me to that assimilation. And it wasn't until black women, particularly my wife and others, started to force me to see how that desire for affirmation was destroying us and them in the process. It wasn't until then that I started to see the person that I had become, and that person was somebody who was really, as I said in the book, was anti black. And I have to
own that. What you say about wanting that affirmation from coaches, from all of these people, I'm a straight white male. You know, as far as we talk about these imbalanced power dynamics, right, I sit up near the top, right, and that desire for affirmation, still in the past, has ruled parts of my life. I can only imagine the pull of the forces when you add everything else into the dynamic that I simply don't have to cope with. Yeah,
that's true. I think you think about race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, geography, immigration status, any of these kind of experiences of modernization brings both visibility and invisibility. So when you're marginalized inside of a space, you're hyper visible, like you're always conscious of being seen. You're always conscious of people seeing you and you being conscious of that being seen. And so this is like one of my one of my brothers,
Darn them More. He has this podcast, Being Seen, which is sitting at the intersections of black male gay life and queer life and trans life. And one of the things he talks about and weave so well in this podcast is these various experiences of hyper visibility. And when you're talking about hyper visibility and being seen, you're oftentimes just differently than those who believe themselves to be the norm. And I think when you're talking about these marginalizations and
being seen. You're always mindful of how you show up in the world. You can't be enraged like other people can be raged. You can't be sorrowful in ways that other people can be sorrowful. But there's also a hyper visibility as well. So it's the tension. It's the paradox where you're conscious of being seen and other people see you, but they don't take your experience seriously enough to actually
change the conditions that you have to live in. So I'm thinking about the experience of college athletes right now trying to fight for rights and trying to you know, trying to create better contentions or even Brian Flores, the coach from the Miami Dolphins s Woo, calls the NFL working like it's on a plantation. We're not only hyper visible, but we're invisible in this space. It's like, yo, you should be grateful for being here, when the actuality, we're
not just grateful to exist. We actually want to have
an experience of being free. And you can only be free when your humanity and your reality and your experiences are not only seen and felt, but actually taken into account inside of environment where you feel seen, inspired and protected, and so so much of that invisibility, invisible in these white institutions that my story is woven into, is me trying to figure out a way how to give voice to so much of the pain, so much of this struggle, so much of the rage, so much of the violence
that I was experiencing, even though it may not have been physical, it was psychological and emotional violence. It was
trauma and being reminded of this trauma. And so much of my book and so much of these experiences are about giving voice to what we experience and what we know to be true and what we feel and are embodied social sales, whether you're talking about being inside of the classroom, whether you're talking about being inside of a social space, whether you're talking about being inside of the civic organization. As theologian Katy Kennon would say, there is
no value free space. We bring whoever we are, and we need to take that seriously, and we need to find ways of being together where we are all seen and inspired and protected in ways that make us more human and not less, and takes into account that we don't all come here the same way that black women see different than I see that me as a young black male see different than white people see that black trends.
But men and men see different than we, as those who assist hit see And we need to take into account that their experiences as much is as important as mine. And I need to take that into consideration and take that seriously and how I show up in the world. You just said something there about there being no value free spaces I want to present. Yeah, that was another
question I wanted to sort of get at. So you were in the white evangelical church, right, which we know that white evangelicals are the large majority of people who elected Donald Trump, right, So it's easy for me as a white person to go, well, dude, you were hanging with the wrong You're hanging with the wrong white cars, right.
So seriously, though, my question is are there spaces that would have been less hostile or felt less violent to you as a black man, or is that the fact that they were mostly white spaces by their very nature are that way? Yeah? Yeah, I think it's by the very nature of being white space. Um, whether you're talking about a conservative space or progressive space. Oftentimes, you know, white people take for granted that they actually are white.
Oh yeah, we don't think about it. Yeah. And so one of the things James Baldwin talked about when he made the statement about, you know, working with the American Communists, is that the American communists forgot that they were actually American, and so many of these value systems of American nous, of dominance, of control, of politics of fear and etcetera, etcetera, was even at work in a separ proclaim radical organization.
And so I think it's by its very nature of being inside of that white space that was hostile to my reality. And I think we have to take into account the social construction of whiteness, that it is a value system um that we have in area from colonialism that makes whiteness the dominating force and how we name see an act within the world, and that dominating force
sees itself as the norm. And whenever you're inside of the space that sees itself as the norm, it is only going to take into reality your way of seeing the world. It is only gonna take that into account very limited ways. Uh. And so I think by very nature of me existing in those spaces was really the culprit of my experience and the kind of struggles that I face. And I want to be clear, this runs rampant as well in black church spaces. So I talk to people all the time about the Black church and
things like that. I say, you know, if we say, you know, the Black church is always a space of liberation, we could say that and say, yeah, that's kind of true. But then also I tell people, you have to take into account if I'm a Black man in that space, then that may be true with me more than if
I'm a Black woman in that space. But if I'm black, g b t Q in that space, oftentimes that space is not a space of liberation, but oftentimes a space that uses patriarchy and called patriarchy God and really utilizes the Bible as a weapon in the same way as white people utilize the Bible as a weapon against us. And so I think, as you're talking about the human experience, we all are shot through with that kind of reality, and we can easily become the worst of who we are.
But there are spaces where that might be true more than others. So I want to live in that tension of not triumphalizing one space over the other, as if like this space is going to be the space that
finally saves what we lost from other spaces. But I will say that you know that some spaces are actually better than others, and we need to find out how to shine light on those spaces and support those spaces so that those spaces are created again and again and again inside of our society and hopes that even in our differences, as ardre Loot was saying, even in our differences, that so many silences can be broken, that we can meet and greet one another and our particular experiences as
human beings who cared deeply about the world we live in and create together. Yeah, I think this is such a thorny problem because how do we find or create spaces that feel equal. You know, let's just say there's a predominantly white space that really says, look, I really want to become a space that's welcoming and open to all. And so in the beginning, I have a few black people who come right in the beginning, it's not their space. It doesn't feel right. Like you said, it's still not right.
But it takes time for people to sort of you know, first there's a few, then there's more, and more, or we could reverse this and say it's a black space and a couple of white people come into it. How communities evolve in general is something I'm really interested in, let alone. I know how hard it is to create and involve any community, let alone one that solves some of these equality problems in a fundamental way. Yeah, and
I think this is the ongoing challenge. You know why why the work and the art is so important is because you know, we have inherited problems that have had centuries to develop. I'm reminded of talking to one of her students, Tea Butler, the writer Uh. And the student came to her and asked about the parable of the source, and the students said, you know, is it as bad as you make it seem in the parables? And she said,
you know, I didn't create the problems. All I let them do was get about thirty years and let the dangers of the past become their disasters in the future. And so the student noticeably shook as he would be acts, Okay, where are we doomed? Uh? And I tell you Butler says, no, we're not doom We're we're here right now in this moment, and the student says, well, what is the answer? And Octavia Butler says, there is no single answer. There are thousands of answers, you know, and you can become one
if you so choose to be. And when I'll tell your Butler wrote that in Essence magazine it was entitle a few rules for predicting the future. She says, we need to learn from the past, we need to respect the law of consequences, and we need to count on surprises.
So as I think about that, and I think about my work, and I think about the work of trying to find healing and wholeness and black stories, black life, black art, and creativity, I want to try and figure out how to continually find in search for those answers
and continually, in small ways, become that answer. Because I know that there is even my book and so many of these books that I'm surrounded about, or so many of these great thinkers that I lean on, there is no one single answer, but there are many answers that we can find in their literature. Where I'm thinking about James Baldwin or Tony K. Bambara or Alice Walker or Richard Wright or somebody in in the in the just
were like James Cone or Katie Kennell. I'm Shawn Copeland that there are so many answers in these very spiritual teachers and leaders, and so many answers in the everyday, ordinary ways that we black people take whatever we have and we turn it black. And I want to find
those answers. I want to find those things that would allow me to embody the best of what we can become and hopefully, over time, like a sculpture and artists, that that over time, every single hit would turn that sculpture into something beautiful, so that when people the years and years and years from now will look back on this sculpture, they will not only here about the journey that got us here, but they will also be able to see the product that we have actually created. And
that's what I think is the answer. It's doing whatever we can in our art to give voice to these stories, to give voice to these experiences, but also to say that we are not just simply what other people make us, but that we are human and worthy of the deepest love and the best any of us have to offer
in any given moment. Beautifully said, I was listening to something this morning and they were talking about an idea that's not terribly unusual but seems to be coming up for me recently, which is that reading fiction makes you a more empathetic human being because you have to see
the world through someone else's eyes or done well. And I'm curious to the extent that you think part of an answer is for white people to be reading black authors, to be getting an understanding of what that actually looks like, and I specifically mean in some cases fiction, given its potential for creating empathy. I'm curious if you have any
thoughts on that. Yeah, that's a hard one, you know, because because we have been writing literature, whether you're talking about poetry, you know, fiction, essays, sermons, songs, we've been doing art for centuries. And even as we have done art for century, there have been white people who have learned and who have changed, but the vast majority of white people have stayed the same and wanted to maintain the white supremacist power superstructure, uh and the inside of
our societies. And you know, even when we're thinking about the abolitionist movement of the time of enslavement, that even the abolitionist in this movement they thought about charity rather than justice. They were okay with, you know, fighting for the calls of seeing black people free from the bondages of slavery, but they did not want to see themselves free from the bondage of white supremacy. So white people were always reading our literature and always taking whatever we
created in this world, sometimes exploiting it. Even now where you're thinking about like black creatives and black TikTok, how so much of like millennials and gen z we're creating so much and still white young people are still benefiting from our creativity and exploiting it, you know. So this is always been like a constant story. But I do think that literature does hold promise for a change. I
do believe that people can change and do change. But for me, I don't think that that is the framework that is most important in my own life and in my own work. I recently wrote a essay with CNN on Black History Month. Whether essay was entitled we Redefined Blackness as a World and a Gift and then this essay.
One of the things that that really stood out to me in my process of writing this essay is I was thinking about Black History Month and thinking about two thousand twenty, where so many of our black books became best sellers, and those books deserve to be best sellers because some of them are great art, and many of
them are great art. But oftentimes I realized that so much of the conversation about black life and art in history is oftentimes flattened because people failed to look at life through our own eyes, like they failed to see the ways that we move and dance and create life, and they felt the felt to see the ways in which like that we are people, that we are human
beyond their gaze. And I wanted to argue that your black history and Black art and creativity is not about saving America or saving white people, that it is about us. That it is not just simply asking the question, you know, how can I remember a learn from black people? But it's all of us asking how can we love black people by seeing us and hearing us and creating a
world where we feel seen, inspired and protected. That is very much farther than simply seeing us as your you know, reading us, talking to us, being around us to teach you, you know, because that simply centers you and what you can learn, how you progress. What I want to do, as Tony Morrison done and so many black writers have done, is take away that kind of gaze and say, you know, it is about us. It is about the world that
we are living in. It is not totally about us, because you know, Baldwin would always say you know that, and the devil finds work that no person can leave of without the others, or Martin Luther King talking about interdependence, that no person can be free without the freedom of
another person. But there is something to be said about the ways in which people reduce us to simply what we can educate them in and and make them feel better or less racist, and how that actually harms us and fails us to see us as fully human in and of ourselves. And so to think about can black literature teach white people or save white people. I don't know in that sense, because history doesn't give us uh any you know, legitimate evidence to believe that fully and finally,
like reading us being around us will save people. But I do believe that literature our lives do hold the problemless uh for all people, and mostly for us to say that we don't have to prove who we are, but that we are actually full of love, full of truth, full of grace, full of failure, full of imagination, full of beauty that's worth studying and documenting and talking about rather than simply reducing list. At the end there you
refer to the white gaze. Right. You referred to your work not being about educating white people, which I couldn't agree with. More. You said wanting to be seen as fully human. And this is where I get challenged personally. I feel like I do see black people as fully human, and I also know that if I ignore the specifics of what it is to be black for them, I feel like I'm missing up and I'm I'm asking this is a very genuine, earnest question about how to relate
just human to human. But if we're not careful, that human to human relationship becomes about what I've learned is propagating white supremacy. Is to say, well, I just don't see color. So I feel like I'm trying to balance these two things. I'm like, well, okay, I want to just see human to human. You've got you've got children, I've got children, You've got parents. You know you've got at a grandparent who passed the dementia my partner's mom
has Alzheimer's, Like we're living the same thing. They're human to human, you know, And then there are these factors of identity and wanting to respect those and understand those, but also not separate. And so that's not even a question so much as it's a you know, yeah, no, no, I got you know, I got you, I got you, And I think I think we have to talk about, you know, the continuity and the discontinuity in our human experience.
You're right, there are going to be aspects of our human experience that intersect, you know, in very real ways, but they're also going to be aspects that intersect in very different ways. So to think about suffering, we're thinking about health care. Let's take healthcare and into example, it's very clear that black women die at higher rates than white women. We may both struggle from hemorrhaging, we may both struggle from emergency induction, we may both struggle from
the pains associated with the body of pregnancy. But when we go inside the hospitals, when we go inside these structures, those structures determine so much in that experience and how that experience is related to and the outcome of those experiences, and so I think we have to talk about that discontinuity as well, that that many of us may experience some of the quote unquote same things, but when we're talking about a kind of ecosystem that we're living in
a structure of life conditions, there's so much discontinuity, you know, in that if we're thinking about social pain and injustice, that that oftentimes, you know, white people experience pain just like we experience pain, but white people also live in a society that believes their pain battle more than other
people's pain. And so you see, we're living inside of a country that oftentimes it's more concerned about poor white people and appealachia then it's concerned about a system that that has impoverished black communities and black schools and and black businesses. Where we're both experiencing poverty in in in very real ways, and there's continuity. But oftentimes the society says that your pain matters more than someone else's pain. And I think many ways for us to kind of
think about that. Many of the ways that we can think better about that is in some sense, you know, creating ways to enter into struggles with the under standing that our struggles may be similar but their fundamental differences, and in some sense I should relate to someone as normal, but that normality is always rooted in the particularities of your identity. You know, when I relate to black women inside of this society, and I think about the ways
in which like I oftentimes upheld patriarchy. When I started to Rebill Hooks and Alice Walker and Tony Morris and an Tony que Barbara, you know, I had to be both disciples out and socialized out of the ways in which I've thought of myself as a black man. You know, then I had to relate to black women and black l g b t Q as normal. Those experience of love, those experiences of failure, those experiences of dreaming and imagination and desire and intimacy is as normal as how I
think about my own self. And it wasn't enough for me to read The Will to Change or Be Real Cool, or In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and of Likes, or deep sightings and rescue missions, or reading June Jordan's and and so much of her work. It was enough for me to read Black Feminists UH and Woman in Theology but I had to fundamentally alter how I thought about myself as a black man to take into account that the way y'all see me needs to be taken seriously.
And of course I struggle and with oppression the same way as you struggle, But there is a discontinuity in our struggles where I may be empowered in one area that you are not. And I need to show up and move move in the world with that awareness and how I converse and how I relate and even public conversation, whose pain whose struggles are oftentimes mute and silence, and how can I bring those struggles along with me when
I showed up in public. So it wasn't enough to just simply read their book and try and change how I thought about myself. I needed to change how I move inside of the world and who I brought along with me. So if we're thinking about patriarchy and gender and sexuality and then bringing race and white supremacy and anti blackness into that, you know, white people should be doing the same. Relate to us as if our reality and our art and our culture is as important and
as normal as yours. And I'll never forget Tony Morrison talking to was being interviewed and the interviewer asked about you know, like you know, white white characters in her literature, and she makes the statement that the interviewer didn't understand just how profoundly racist that question was. To ask Donni Morrison, like, you know, when you're gonna write about why there are more white people in your literature and when you're gonna
write about more white people? And then Tony Morrison made the statement, you can't even imagine that the way I live is actually the mainstream and you're outside of the mainstream. So it is changing how we think of ourselves and relate to ourselves as we relate to other people, and thinking about these norms and values and ideas and reshaping them so that you know, we found better ways of
being together. Yeah. I am now again need about ten or fifteen minutes to fully process everything that you said there. I love what you say about the places where we sort of intersect and then also diverge, you know, and that being real. And I think that what you were talking about with relating to say, black women brings up some of the dynamic, right, which is how do I relate to a group that I see as having been marginalized in certain ways, and that I'm part of the
marginalizing group, you know, in certain spaces. And what's the proper relation, you know, because you mentioned earlier about the abolitionists, you know, wanted charity not justice. You know. So these are a lot of really profound questions that we are running out of time to be able to answer, and
as you said, they're they're incredibly complex. I want to spend a little bit of time though, talking about your work and the relation it has to your life, the role that creation plays for you, going all the way back to where we started talking about being whole humans. You know, what is the role that creation plays for you in being a whole human if we think it in religious terms of like creation as the created world,
or I mean you as an artist? Okay, cool, cool? Yeah, And I think it does have relation to like the created world as well. That so much of you know, our work as artists, as James Bob would say, is in some sense taking the intangible dreams that reside inside of us and around us and making them tangible inside of the world. That he said, this is not the statesman that is our strongest arm in leading us away
from the old world into the new. But it is the writer and I think because as we pay attention to the created world, we realized that these circumstances have been created, and if they have been created, then they
can be rethought and reimagined. And so so much of my work as an artist is looking at the world that we have inherited, both on a social political level, but also looking at the black worlds that I have inherited and figure out how to lean and dance and explore these black worlds that I've inherited, so that this world that we are living in, that we have inherited a world marked by white supremacy, anti blackness, homophobia, transphobia, able ism, all the isms marked by so many fault
lines and so much power struggles and and ideas of control. That our work as artists is to try and find ways that we can uncover the beauty and the sacredness of our lives and uncovered the tension and the complexity that we bring to life every single day, and try and again and again and again to show up on the page telling people to pose and look again at us and say that there is so much more for us to see. There's so much more for us to explore,
There's so much more for us to lean into. Because when you think about healing and wholeness, if you're just thinking about our own kind of emotional healing and wholeness, Oftentimes finding healing and wholeness is about making sense of what has happened in the past and how that lingers in the present and hopes that in the future we
can show up better than what we were. And I think my job as an artist is to lean inside of the stories of so much of Black literature and Black religion and figure out ways to make sense of the past and figure out how we can be better in the presence so that we embody something better in the future. What is that creative process like for you personally? In what ways do you feel that you being an artist lifts you up personally? I think for me, so much of that work is about finding ways to speak
to what I'm feeling, you know. So much of my writing is out of things that I read and things that I'm wrestling with. You know, so much of this work is bound with so much insecurity in reality, Like whatever we create has the opportunity to make us most insecure because oftentimes we're creating work out of competition and felt need to be relevant in the sense of, you know,
the algorithm. The algorithm, you know will destroy us because we gotta always create, create, create what's been designed in this present moment, and if we do that over and over, we're going to gonna get burned out. And I feel like that that this, like comparison, is the thief of creativity, and so much of my work is trying to create away from that, move away from comparing myself to people and right and what I want to write, Like like I wrote this joint on Tony Morrison hopefully that goes
live this week because I wanted to write it. That the piece for CNN. I wrote it because I wanted to write it. I'm working right now, want to essay on some of soul and black gospel because I want to write these things. So for me, so much of this work is doing the work that I want to do.
You know, it's easy to try and beat somebody else as a writer, or be somebody else as a podcast, or be somebody else as a creative, but so much of our life depends on us being who we are and trying to be the best that we can be in that and for me, that makes me come most alive. It's challenging, it's hard because sometimes what you want is not what others want from you. And the moments you gotta give people what they want you do as as a writer, there are moments where you just gotta give
people what they want. I was reminded of this even with that Tony Moore is an article. I had to be rioted of that that yo, like like my boy Robert, Yeah, to remind me give the people what they want when they ask it for this article, you know, and sometimes it's going to be like that that you've got to give people what they want. But you also want to do what you want to do and what makes you
feel most alive. And I think so much of creation and being an artist is about interviewing people that make us come alive or writing about things that make us come alive. So yeah, I think that's a beautiful place for us to end. Dante. That's a that's a beautiful sentiment to go out on. So thank you so much for coming on. Your book is called Shouting in the Fire and American Epistle will have links in the show notes where people can get access to that you are
an exceptional, exceptional writer. It's really powerful book. So thank you so much for spending some of your time with us. Thank you, Eric, and thank you to the listeners of the One You Feed You Make podcast and what it is. You make so much of this what it is, and I want to do this as I do at the end of every interview, I want to thank you listeners for engaging, for supporting, for sharing. Keep doing that keeps
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