Good morning, Keeps, and welcome to woke F Daily with Meet your Girl Daniel Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, I'm very excited to introduce this guest to you today who is making their first time appearance on WOKF, Esa McCauley, who is a New York Times contributing opinion writer and the author of a new book out today entitled How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family Story of
hope and survival in the American South. Esa McCauley is extraordinary, and you will hear that as we get into the conversation around his book, but around what it means to be black, to be a theologian, to write a story about the narrative of your family, but a lot, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Black families whose experiences mirror your own. At a time and in a society that doesn't want to see us, that doesn't want to hear us, that wants our capitulation to white supremacy and
our pended knee to their power. It is an extraordinary time, folks, that we are living in where I got to say, you know, I know that in dark times, a lot of art is created, a lot of literature is created, and there are cracks of light that break through. There are just some days though, that as a black queer woman in America, that some days are just too much,
you know, like they're just it's just too much. It's like every headline everywhere you look, is just something to erase the scraps of rights and equality and freedom that you've gained, that your ancestors gained, and to really understand
and put it into perspective. Folks, it was four hundred plus years of enslaved brutality terrorism that was state sanctioned, country sanctioned, president after president after president, and even after the practice, the abhorrent, disgusting practice of slavery was condemned,
there is still past. Jim Crow, after one hundred years of again state sanctioned terrorism, thievery of work of labor, rite in justice, and indignities that black people experience at the hands of white people in this country, still in the twenty first century, fighting to have their acts of violence against us be on record, be known. Ask yourself that if white people are so goddamn proud and so goddamn exceptional, then why are they so fucking afraid of
the truth. They want to talk about everyone who wants to highlight and make people aware of the terrorism, the brutality. You're talking about people that lynched pregnant women and cut babies out of their stomachs. You want to talk about people that blew up children, that beat them that, let me tell you something, that sent them to alligators as bait. There are mass gravesites all over this country, soil soaked with the blood and bones of Black people, enslaved and
free children, women and men. So this story that Isa McCauley tells in his new book is a story that needs to be told of so much so I hope that you will click the link in the bio of today's episode and buy his book for yourself, for your family, for your friends. It is entitled How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCauley. My conversation with him is
coming up next, folks. I am so excited to welcome to okaf Daily for the very first time, doctor Esa McCauley, who is the author of the new book How Far to the Promised Land, One Family, One Black Family, story of hope and survival in the American South He is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and
a theologian in residence in Chicago. I want to start off with what I just said before we started recording, which is that I read one of your pieces and you have any and I will say that your ability to weave a story is absolutely beautiful, Like I just arrive in the place that you're describing. And as somebody who you know reads a lot of opinions, writes a lot of a lot of my own opinion, it is never lost on me when a piece can bring me to tears at a time when I feel like I
am almost dried out from tears. So my first question for you is as a theologian in residence, as someone who is writing and is putting out a book at a time when books are being banned, a book on racism, a book on being black, a book on the black family that is provoking questions and thought, What is it like to be an author, a theologian, a Christian during this time?
I would say it's very hard and one of the things that I had devoted myself to do it even if it cost me, Like readers or viewers or cliques is to say, with all of the noise that's going on around, I want to tell distinctively black stories rooted in my community and my experience, and tell stories that don't edit out the things that are important to me. And things that important to me are my faith and
being black and actually being Southern. I remember when I first got to college and I would have these teachers and they would tell me about They would use analogies, but the analogies I never got there. They would talk about what's that British show Monty Python or whatever, or they talk about Seinfelder France. No shade to those shows, But growing up I wasn't watching France in China, but I felt in Monty Python. And so I always felt like my culture and our stories and our narratives weren't
worthy of being the center of attention. And I said to myself when I began writing, at first, I tried to tell stories that everybody would identify with whether you were black or you're white.
Then everybody would get it.
And I realized that the best way to tell the universal story to tell the true story from the place that you know. And I can't describe the only thing I can say this is I can't describe any of the place like I can describe the Black South. I know, I know what like what the food tastes like, I know what like the neighborhood feels like. I know the
rhythms of the jokes and all of those things. And so for me, I felt like, in this moment when they're erasing our stories, it was crucial for me to tell our story as a way of saying it's with us as the protagonist. You know what I mean by that is that it's easy, and this is no shade how other people do their writing, because all of it's necessary. It's easy to tell the story of black response is
to whatever's happening to us. But to put this in the center of the narrative over and over again is something I strived to.
Do as a writer.
I love the idea of first as a writer right trying to recreate other people's stories. I think I can remember, you know, listening to one of Oprah Winfrey's many interviews where she said that when she got in front of a camera, she tried to be Barbara Walters. Yeah, because that's what she that's what she knew. She's like, I'm just gonna try and be her, and then through course of time realife there is already a Barbara Walter. Then I can't be that. I can't be her, and I
can't be her. And I think that for black writers, particularly those who find themselves inside of legacy newsrooms and places, are often told that by telling our stories or making ourselves the protagonist, then we are and the ability to be neutral. Yeah, so I want to yeah, so please please, I think.
I think.
I remember when I first got the job and I was writing these opinion pieces, and I said, I need to write these big, huge, universal stories with these grand, sweeping themes. And then I realized, actually, the most important stories are the small stories. And so whenever something happens nationally, it's not that I put myself at the center of the narrative. That's not what it's about. It's I try
to provide a way in that it's actually authentic. So when all Made Aubrary was murdered while he was out on a run, I thought about what it was like to run as a black man in a white neighborhood. When when the children were murdered in at the Covenant School in Nashville, I thought about, like what it would be like as a parent to have to pick out
funeral clothes for your children. And because I thought about, you know, one of the things you do with children when you have them is you get them dressed in the morning, and like you think about them. And there's an a ridiculous part at least we go to church on Sunday, when you have like a little person in a suit, it's like it doesn't match right. It's like
they're too little, they shouldn't be in those outfits. And so what I was, what I was trying, what I've tried to do, is tell the truest stories I know how to tell. And I wanted, I wanted so much for a black person who who opens one of my articles and clicks through them to see themselves and to imagine themselves being represented. I'm not all black people, and I'm a particular black person I think is recognizable to people who grew up like I did.
I want to talk about your book How Far to the Promised Land and its title first, and as a person who this is me, as a person who has struggled with organized religion. Yeah, I am a black queer woman, child of immigrants, and I have struggled with organized religion for all the ways that it has showcase nos in people's lives right and because of those no's, people have
in fact minimized their lives or ended their lives. So when you say how far to when you talk about the promised land, we know in biblical terms what the promised land is, but I'm also wondering, in our daily lives, in regular life, is there a promise land that we're actually reaching and seeking for.
Interesting because it's a religious book, and well there's religious elements in the book, but the term promised land here doesn't actually refer to heaven or like the hereafter the origin, the kind of the beginning event that kind of starts it starts the book is. My father dies in twenty seventeen in a single car accident. He was a truck driver in California. We grew up in the South, and he was far from everybody that he knew and he loved.
And when he was a part of.
Our life, he was often dealt with drugs and addiction and abuse, and that kind of marked with my experienced it for that reason I didn't know him, and to be honest, I didn't like him very much because of the things he did growing up. But my family had asked me to do the eulogy for which required me to learn about his history and the things that shaped him. And anyone you know, you gotta know about their life, and so I didn't know about my own father's life
in his background. So I sat down with members of my family and found.
Out about who he was.
And in the process of finding out about his past and this background, for example, I found out that his father one of the last days, his father said to him that he wasn't no good and he was never going to be anything. I learned about my family's history and what I saw in this story that ended up becoming a multi generational epic. He said, a lot of people in my family were struggling to arrive in this
place that I described as the Promised Land. And the promise Land is just a place where you can be loved, safe from harm. Right growing up in the gymical South, it was just like there. It was just dangerous, and a lot of people in my family don't arrive what the American dream describes as the promised Land, kind of this safe middle class life. But Nonetheless, the lives that they lived mattered. The struggles that they went through to live with dignity and respect.
And honor matters.
And so what I was trying to say in hel Far to the Promised Land is here all of the ways in which society push these roadblocks in front of black flourishing. And here's the ways in which their struggle to find meaning and purpose matters, even if they don't arrive through what we describe as the Promised lad And so it's really not a book about a bunch of people trying to find their way to happen. It's about people struggling in the South, across generations in my family,
to find meaning and purpose in their lives. And because it's a black family spanning from the nineteen hundreds all the way up to the present, like every black family experiences all of America, in the sense that the traumas and the brokenness and the dysfunction of America always lands in.
A lap of Black people. So Jim Crow's in.
Abstraction, it's something that actually happened. Tendant forming happens, Brown red boy of education happens. And so it's the journey of all of these people are trying to try to find meaning and purpose. Now where God comes into it in my family's life is that I have to tell the stories that occur in my family across these generations, and for many of those people, God, for them and for me, was a source.
Of comfort and.
Encouragement in the world that often traumatizes black people. So I know that that's not everybody's experience with religion, but in my family, for many of us, God was a helper and not necessarily a burden.
And that's once again not even universal because.
The people in my family who like you, reject or have troubles with make a system organized religion. So it's not like a story of all Christians. It's about people who make different decisions about how to even deal with things like God.
And faith and religion.
When you think about the legacy of your family that you learned through this book, through your conversations, and you juxtapose it coming out at a time when those very stories are being erased, are are literally Governor Rohn des Santis stood in a front of a podium yeah and said, there's no merit to it. There's no merit to their experience. There's no merit to their story.
One of the weird things are the odd things about being black in America, is that our stories are always under attack, and so they're always tinily like. There's always this persistent effort to erase our narrative. And so when I wrote, when I started writing Half Out to the Promised Land, I didn't know that it was going to come out in a time.
Where these stories were being pushed back.
But one of the narratives that I that I talk about is my grandfather on my mother's side of the family, who grew up in the nineteen forties under Jim Crow and he started he started as a tenant farm when he was four years old.
Four years old working on the tenant farm.
And him and all of his siblings would like pitt cotton, and then they would go to school and they were they would they would let them out for extended breaks so they can come back and pick cotton during harvesting season. And no matter how well the crop did at the end of the year, he said that his grandfather who raised him, would come and they would tell him, you just broke even. And all my grandfather got in the nineteen forties, now where a pair of overalls, some shoes,
and some books. It's almost like functional slavery. And because of that, he was sent to segregated schools and he was sixteen or seventeen years old when he's a freshman in high school. Not because he was under educated, because he was economically exploited and mistreated.
Now because my.
Father, my grandfather, went to segregated schools and he was overworked and under educated. We all know that the biggest predictor, the biggest predictor of college future is the education of one's parents. That means my mother became was educated, but was raised in the household that was directly impacted by Jim Crow economically and as relates to education. And my mother becomes the first person in generation in my family to go to integrated schools. This is the nineteen sixties,
in nineteen seventies, your massive resistance. And she goes to school and see the half to teacher don't want to teacher because they don't want to teach the black kid. And so we talked about this like long history of segregation. We tend to believe that integration happened and there was no long term economic or social impact, and that even the integrated school integrated. Children with the integrated schools were treated fairly. And when the schools integrated, the school integrated.
You know what happened. All of the money left Northwest Hunstville I was from, and I came into a failing school academically. Why because all of the money and the resources left in redlining. And so all I have to say is through the narrative history of my family, my grandfather, my mother and me, you see the long economic and social tale Jim Cruw. The funny thing about it, we do health far to the problems land Part two would see that now my exact my same neighborhood is gentrifying.
If they tore down.
My school where I went to school, and now there's literally a white neighborhood right there where the place where I used to play football with this re county in their store. I went to where my football field was last weekend and there was a park and there was one black family at that park. And so this is a long legacy of the economic legacy of Jim Crow. And this is the story we need to tell. Is of course you have to ask ourselves, is this justice?
This actually what we want? America? To do or we're comfortable with America doing this to black people. And so I wanted to tell my family story as a way of highlighting not through statistics and argument, because that stuff exists, but through the story of one family what America.
Does to Black people.
How do you stay faithful? I mean, in all honesty, like I guess, and this is a place that I struggle, and you know, but I tell people, I obviously wouldn't turn on a microphone every single day to talk about the issue, to talk about injustice, to talk about the headlines, to try and wake people up if I did not have faith in the fact that people can change.
Right.
However, it is the consistent cycle of trauma and violence and erasure that this country gobbles up the same way they do fast food. And so, how do you stay faithful? And what advice do you have for others that find themselves struggling so much?
Right now, I'll give you two answers. One is the kind of practical one and the one that's whatever I'm going to call the second.
The first one is.
I remember that when George full Actually this goes all the way back to twenty sixteen, when my writing career really begin to they seriously, we're heading towards we're heading into what was Donald Trump elected?
My goodness, it feels like this.
Is January seventeen.
Yeah, so I remember heading sorry, I remember heading into the summer before that, and it was the rise of anti black violence, and if anyone knows anything about history, felt a lot like Red Summer when the African Americans came back from World War One and they said, can we have justice? They were responded, they met with a large way with anti black racism. And I saw the end of the Obama presidency and I saw what was coming and I said, oh no, we're about to go
through it. And I didn't think that anybody would listen. But I felt I have small children, and I felt there needed to be a record. They needed to be a record that there was somebody who said, we see what's happening, and we understand what you were doing to us. Because for me, even if there was no one who could change it, something like the existence the Souls of Black Folks, the existence of that book by W. E. B. The Boys, the existence of some of James Baldwin's writings
was a comfort to me. There was someone who could explain to us what was happening. And I felt like one day I was going to have my children going to reach the age of kind of like that point as a black child where you kind of go this world is messed up and it feels like it's riggered against me. And I had this real idea that what if my son or daughter looks at me and says, Dad,
what did you do? And I really want to be able to say here like, this is a literary output that I put out in this moment to help make the world a little bit better for you. Maybe nobody read it but you, But I wanted to have something I can say. I'm not an activist, I'm not their skills that I lack. All I can do is right.
So I wrote in some sense for my children. And on one level, I can't give up hope because I can't just say I'm going to give the world as it is to the next generation, because I felt like other black people did do that. This may get to the second reason why I have hope. One of the interesting things to do is to go back and read African American literature at these key turning points in history. So, for example, if you go back to the Emancipation Proclamation.
You can see black people gathering in churches all over America and they will say, clearly, it wasn't Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, it was God. And they seemed to say that at each moment when they got a little bit of freedom, they saw the hand of God's providence. Now we might look back and say they were naive for thinking that, but I don't actually think that what
they're saying it's true. And in the end, I kind of believe, like doctor King, that there is a God who orders their affairs of humanity, and that white supremacy is his sovereign over human history, that God is sovereign of human history. Because I believe that God is sovereign of human history, I never completely without hope, because I can't look at any moment in American history and from that moment hope to get to the future, because every single time he got a little bit of justice, it's
been a massive backlash. But I want to say that even in mister of that cycle of a progress backlash, progress backlash, there is to me a moral order to universe that that gives me a sense of hope. And meaning it allows me to go forward. One of the things that I think about a lot, and I'm not figuring it from going on. It's like I think it's Plasy versus Fergus in whichever one. It was, like they said, there is no law given as relates to a black man that a white man is man. There is still
bye bye. So that's like eighteen, like fifty eight or whatever that is. And it feels like the entirety of the abolitionist movement was at its conclusion, there was no way for what you lost at the highest core in the land, and somehow the civil rights the Civil War happens and black people are free within a decade, And I wonder a lot it's like after that laws passed and there is no hope, there's no there's no logical there's no trick or move that the abolitionists had left
after lotion in that case to go forward. But they went forward because they believed in the truth.
Of the thing.
And somehow, I'm not saying we've got freedom like equality, but slavery end in a way that was unimaginable in the aftermath in that court case. So sometimes I do think that a lot of justice. Work is a stumbling around in the darkness and hoping that that you meet the light as as as you go forward. And that's the only thing that you can do, because because laying down and quitting feels like a victor for the bad people who.
Want to oppress you.
That just gave me hope. Just that just gave that just gave me.
Also say, like, I have like.
Three or four friends and we decided that we can't all be realistic at the same time.
Yes, it's very today today, today, today, I need to call you and go through it, right, I need to call you and talk about these people driving me crazy, and like, but every now and then, sometimes this is true.
Sometimes there's three or four of us, it's only one of us. It's only one of us who got to ope. But there is there is a text thread that like I text through it, and so I say to people, like what you may hear from me publicly, it's not a facade. But you don't get everything right, you don't get everything that's in my life. And there's conversations that I have that are real and raw and unfiltered that
I must process off camera or off microphone. But then I can go on and have something to say, like on microphone, and so that's also something.
That I found really helpful.
No, I one hundred percent agree. If not for my own circle of friends, if not for like the privacy cloak that I put around my life, I would go off the deep end all the time, and rightfully so, because there is a there is a lot to be upset about.
But sometimes I think it's also important because I'm not I'm not like put together. Sometimes people need to feel that unfiltered pain, frustration and anger. And I feel like as a writer, and this is the hard part because it means that like, I couldn't do your show because I can't deal with this every day.
I write once a month, but sometimes.
I have to allow all the feelings to come inside so that I can write in a way that other people can see and identify with. So you had the event in Jacksonville, and I had to I had to feel the the frustration and the anger and the rage and communicate that in a way that that people need to understand that.
The answer isn't always black patience.
And kind of it's like we can be angry at being murdered and we can tie one murder to another murder and run that through history. And I feel like that is an important part of the work that we do. As well we articulate the hope, we also have to articulate the frustration. If you're going to be authentic to the varied experiences that go on in the hearts of black people.
It's that James Baldwin quote.
You know to be a Negro in America to be slightly constantly in the constant state of rage.
And so I try.
I try to balance both being reserved and knowing when to be as honest as I know.
How to be.
Well. I can't thank you enough for your work, for your honesty, for your faith, and I really appreciate you making the time to talk with me today. Folks. The book is How Far to the Promised Land. Pick it up, get it, read it, discuss it, use it as a guide in all the ways possible through this moment. Isa mcaulay, doctor, I appreciate you.
Podcast, Thank you for having me.
That is it for me today, Dear friends, on Woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke. As fun