Transcript
Into America
Space to Grieve
Trymaine Lee: There’s an unbearable weight that many of us are carrying right now.
Archival Recording: (Inaudible) issues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Archival Recording: (Inaudible) post it online.
Archival Recording: Supreme Court has delivered another blow to the Voting Rights Act.
Archival Recording: The explosive leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the–
Archival Recording: Over 40 percent of baby formula supplies are out of stock due to a product recall.
Archival Recording: Regulating how individual–
Lee: A global pandemic coupled with record inflation, huge blows to police reform, voting protections, abortion rights have made life in America feel hopeless for many.
Archival Recording: The governor signed a bill criminalizing transgender health care for minors.
Archival Recording: Inflation Rose 7.9 percent year-over-year in February this–
Archival Recording: (Inaudible) across the country, legislators in 20 states have introduced bills to restrict critical race theory.
Lee: Then came the news of the mass shooting, an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, coming just days after the racist rampage in Buffalo sent shockwaves of pain across the country.
Archival Recording: And the community of Buffalo is special, it’s also reeling tonight after 10 People, 10 good people nearly all black were gunned down in a racially motivated attack.
Archival Recording: We’re learning more about the nightmare that unfolded inside Rob elementary as a killer unleashed his rampage on children and teachers, celebrating their last week of school.
Lee: How can we collectively grieve when one community can barely place their dead in the ground before another community has to prepare to do the same? How can we pray to whoever or whatever you pray to when here on Earth the action and inaction of politicians on both sides of the aisle stifles any power that our prayers might have? How can we act as a people when the deck is so stacked in the favor of corporations, the rich and the politicians whose pockets they line?
In novelist Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, we meet a world beyond the age of social and climactic collapse. A vision into a future where characters are contending with the question of survival. Butler asks us, when the world ends time after time, when the blow of destruction hits us again and again, what spiritual and physical tools are at our disposal? She writes this, “Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”
Right now, it feels like we’re stuck between rage, despair and a deep enduring sadness.
But Pastor Michael McBride is showing us what a practice of persistence can look like.
Pastor Michael McBride: My strategy is never to kill the thief who’s trying to steal my humanity. My strategy is to make sure the thief has no power to steal my humanity. With more than 20 years in ministry, Pastor McBride’s the church and community organizations to work on some of the biggest systemic issues of our times.
His Church, The Way Christian Center is based in Berkeley, California, but his Live Free activism campaign around racial justice and violence takes him all around the country. I first met him in Ferguson during the uprising there in 2014. And now, during a time when elected officials continue to stalled on the issues that matter to us most, Pastor Mike shows us a model for participatory politics that isn’t limited to the ballot box and a faith walk that isn’t limited to the Bible.
McBride: Our faith should embolden us to continue to love the unlovable to minister to those who are sick, to dismantle the systems and the powers and the principalities that wage war against the mind the body and the soul of the vulnerable.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee and this is Into America.
This week, we’re settling deep into our current moment, exploring how we can make sense of the world and all the hurt and pain around us and what we can do to soothe this feeling of spiritual ache and push toward a better tomorrow.
Pastor Mike, thank you for joining us, man.
McBride: Oh, brother. It’s always good to be with you, Trymaine. Thanks for having me.
Lee: We’ve found ourselves in one of these kind of Twilight Zone moments where everything seems to be upside down. I feel like many of us are trapped somewhere between anguish and hurt and rage. And it doesn’t feel like there’s much sturdy under our feet from Buffalo, the mass murder of some of our elders, to this school shooting in Texas, the attack on women’s bodies and reproductive systems. It goes on and on.
And I wonder from your vantage point, as someone who is a man of great faith, but also walks in this real world, how are you seeing this moment? Are you feeling as depleted as I am or how are you doing, man?
McBride: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’m planning a message this Sunday that’s speaking to Psalms 137. It says how can we sing the songs of our ancestors, the Lord’s songs, whether in a strange land, of foreign experience, a place where we are disoriented where we feel like we’re constantly under assault.
It’s important, I think, for us to not deny how we feel. Certainly, we who believe in this idea that we are created in the image of God that we are human beings that are comprised of many, many kinds of constituencies: our mind, our heart, our body, our emotions. Sometimes we may live too long in our mind and not allow our emotions to have their full range of experiences, which helped make us human.
So I’ve been in a state of mourning. I’ve been using the practices of my faith tradition that’s called lament where you just sit in a space and understand that this is not the way the world is supposed to be. It’s certainly not the life that we deserve as descendants of African folks.
So absolutely, it’s disorienting. And I think we ought to we ought to spend some time sifting through that to help us understand where we should go from here.
Lee: When you talked about this idea that this is not the world as it is, it’s not the world as it should be or is even meant to be, how do you guide folks who seek counsel from you in your congregation on that line between being faithful and lamenting and understanding but also actually doing something to maybe change it here on earth?
McBride: Well, I think lament is not intended to be an exercise of paralysis. It’s intended to be an active part of how we move forward. Sometimes we think that acknowledging the pain you feel the trauma you’re enduring, the stress you’re carrying is a de facto state of paralysis.
I tell folks all the time, we must acknowledge the kind of difficulties that we’re enduring but we cannot become hopeless. I have to say hopelessness is as deadly as a bullet and so parts of these acts of terror, whether they are violence upon our bodies, whether they are policy and systemic fights that attempt to strip away our humanity or our human rights, part of the act of terror is to make us so afraid and paralyzed that we give up hope.
But we can’t lose hope, we must continue to draw from the resources of our faith traditions, of our cultural reservoirs of the lessons learned from our ancestors and then we must chart out a path forward that reminds ourselves that we are greater than our enemies’ best intents.
They may have more money, but they don’t have more resources. They may have more power, but they don’t have more authority. So, it is for us to continue to restate and, dare I say, reconstitute the ways in which we endure these moments in times, but stay true to our humanity. We should never lose our humanity in the acts of the inhumane things being done to us.
Lee: It seems important to state and restate this idea of holding on to our humanity. But I think in this moment, there are a lot of people struggling with that, especially if you are black in this country and you feel our humanity is constantly under attack.
This thing about Buffalo in particular, the cowardice of this white supremacist to go in and murder our elders and being reminded that so many people in this country do not see our humanity.
McBride: Right.
Lee: I certainly don’t think it speaks to our humanity or does speak to theirs.
McBride: Right.
Lee: How do we hold on to that humanity in the face of what we’ve been going through?
McBride: Well, I think we cannot allow our lives even if they appear to be contingent upon the kind of whims of the white imagination or white anxieties. We cannot allow ourselves to believe that our lives are so contingent in this way. We may find ourselves susceptible to these kinds of onslaughts, but we must continue to remind ourselves that our dignity is inherent, our value is inherent. It is not dependent upon even how I treat you, as a brother, you treat me as a brother.
I and we, as a people are people worthy of love, worthy of security, worthy of safety, worthy of dignity, worthy of protection and the loss of any of those things are actually a commentary on the thief who is attempting to take those things from us. Perfection from black folks need not be a prerequisite for us to access our basic human rights. What it means to be human, even as a black person is to be able to make a mistake. To feel the full gamut of our emotions, whether it is anger, whether it is joy, whether it is depression or whether it is a space of elation.
That we as humans must always allow ourselves to be fully human and remind ourselves that the thief who seeks to steal our humanity is the real antagonist in this story. My strategy is never to kill the thief who’s trying to steal my humanity. My strategy is to make sure the thief has no power to steal my humanity.
I’m okay if the thief wants to remain alive, you just need to not have the power to impact the lives of those I love, the lives of those I know, the lives of those who are left in my charge. In this way, as Shirley Chisholm calls them, we need a bloodless revolution. As Dr. King continues to talk about a revolution of values, we need to make sure that the weapons of our fight, the weapons of our warfare, they do not depend on the human destruction of individuals, because that is then another tearing away of our humanity, but we must maintain our dignity, but also our strengthen insistence that this is who we are, this is what we deserve and living every day in love with black people is how we maintain our humanity.
Lee: Brother, our faith throughout our time in this country has been tested time and again, but our faith tradition has also always been entangled with this sense of hope, and optimism, and aspiration and that lament but also with policy, and hate and racism.
As you look at our broader faith journey to this point as black people in this country, what is where we’ve been, teach us about where we are now.
McBride: It’s a great Sankofa principle, we look backward in order for us to kind of know how to go forward. I think I’ve learned several things, for 400 years I think this country has taught us that the majority of white citizens in this country are largely unreliable, when it comes to liberation of our people, which then means to teach me that that means the faith of the large majority of white folks is incapable of speaking deeply to our condition.
The political projects of these individuals are incapable of speaking to our tradition. The leadership of these communities are incapable of speaking and really leading us to a place where we deserve. So then that puts the onus on us as a people to have self-determination, right, and allow ourselves to excavate the very powerful religious, political, cultural resources that are a part of our journey in this country.
Our faith, as you know, followers of Jesus, as followers, if you are Muslim, of the Quran, and/or if you’re Buddhist or whatever, our faith at its core has always been about liberation. It’s been about inclusivity. It’s been about how do we ensure that no matter who you are, you have the power to fully access that which is your birthright.
I think we excavate that. We must continue to search for those models, those examples. We must continue to look to ourselves and to perhaps expand our circles to those us who are outside of our, say, immediate racial cultural context but also have some affinity to the same principles.
But I do believe that my faith tradition, I’m a fourth generation of holiness Pentecostal, which means I do speak in tongues, I do roll on the floor, I do so speak in front of chandeliers and on a good Sunday, I levitates, somebody say, amen. All that means is that there have been spaces and places in my tradition where we have had to escape, although temporarily from the onslaught of white supremacy and anti-black racism, but then the power of my tradition, then gives me the resources I need to go out into the marketplace, out into the ballot box, out into the neighborhood and fall back in love with the people who I’m called to serve.
So our faith should embolden us to continue to love the unlovable, to minister to those who are sick, to dismantle the systems and the powers and the principalities, that wage war against the mind, the body and the soul of the vulnerable. That’s the best of our faith tradition. It ought not take its cues from our oppressor, it ought to take its cues from the faithful among us and we have centuries of faithful examples and all of our faith traditions that we ought to look to, to help us figure out how we chart this new season ahead of us.
Lee: What does that war against those forces look like when we’re blending the ethereal and spiritual with the political? We are here in this country bound by laws, many of them unjust, what does that war even look like?
McBride: It looks like what Dr. King calls, we build the “beloved community.” It looks like we act in ways that actually reflect our commitments to a, as Jesus prayed, heaven on earth as it is in heaven. So to me, it is about ensuring that every policy that we support, every policy that we purport, that we lift up is grounded in healing, it’s grounded in the idea of doing no harm, it’s grounded in this idea that you may not believe my theological assumptions, but my theological assumptions should have space to believe in you, right?
Lee: Mm-hm.
McBride: To believe in your humanity. It means that we are to literally divest ourselves from every institution that depends on violence in order to preserve peace. We must critique the military industrial complex that wages war against dark skinned nations and then spills over to dark skinned communities in the United States. We must critique the kinds of profit and capitalistic endeavors that, at all costs, extract wealth, and wisdom, and knowledge, and skill labor from the masses to allow a billionaire class, even in a global pandemic to increase.
Well, we ought to critique that and not aspire to that. We ought to ensure that we’re talking about trauma in our communities, that we’re not going first to medication in order to address trauma at the expense of actually slowing down and creating healing and communal spaces where people can recover their mind, their body and their spirit. We must make sure our relationships are tender with each other, right?
Lee: Mm-hm.
McBride: In every kind of way, whether it is in our romantic relationships, our political relationships, our organizing relationships. And so as we as we attempt to navigate the spiritual, the secular, the ethereal and the concrete, it’s important for us to not lose the mandate to stay in love and deep relationship with one another.
It is, I think, our greatest task in this moment where we are literally being detached from one another through social media through the kind of the barriers between the screen and the actual interpersonal, in-person relationships. All of these things are a threat to us. We must lean back in to face-to-face, breast and breasts, brother to brother, sister to sister, loved one to loved one, hands and feet and presents, I believe all of those things help inspire the way we can be faithful in this moment.
Lee: Certainly love is strong and, ideally, we need more love. It’s the only way to clearly is too much hate in this country in this world. But is there room for anger? We’re seeing babies murdered and eldest slaughtered and our rights being stripped away from us. The franchise, the so-called constitution whatever that thing means, is there room for anger in this space right now?
McBride: Well, the opposite of love is hatred is not anger, so absolutely. I believe that my love for our people is what evokes righteous indignation against the system and then the culprits of these systems that find our bodies and our conditions to be so vulnerable to the whims of these maniacal, white supremacist authoritarian impulses that certainly existed pre-Donald Trump and the rise of kind of the Fox News machinery, but they have certainly gassed it up in a way where our generation, yours and mine has not seen this,
I was talking with the 80-year-old bishop in Buffalo, and he told me many of his stories growing up in South Carolina and how he is seeing almost a re-inscribing of some of the kind of degradation and vulnerability that he himself had to live through and so this is our generations experience of it. We ought to be angry, but the question is what do we do with our anger.
Our anger cannot become an occasion for us to inflict trauma on ourselves or even on the people we love. This anger ought not caused us to strike out at the people we’re proximal to, our partners, our children, our comrades in movement spaces. Even those among us who we may not agree with fully.
There has to be a solidarity that we maintain even as we are dealing and processing through the anger that comes alongside and, I dare I say, is a result of the love we have. I’m not angry at you being hurt, dear brother, unless I love you deeply. So the question is, can I hold my anger and then channel that anger in ways that alleviate your suffering, not create more suffering for myself or for those who I know and love.
I think that’s an important conversation because trauma in our communities is often transfer to those who we’re proximal to. It’d be one thing if our anger were being directed in a structured way towards those who are the perpetrators of this violence towards us, right?
Lee: Mm-hm.
McBride: But often, we turn on each other in anger, because we have a certain consciousness, that too much anger directed towards the white supremacist system actually could unleash a whole lot of violence on us that many of us are trying not to necessarily live through. There’s an important conversation about what do we do with this anger in a constructive way and I hope that we can have those conversations that actually lead to systemic structural change. I think there’s a way to do both of those.
Lee: It reminds me of Frantz Fanon, this idea of the colonized person turning that violence inward because they’re not lash out at the oppressor and the colonizer, right?
McBride: Yes.
Lee: But it also reminds me of, you know, a moment that I shared with you that I think about often, the night that Darren Wilson was not charged with the killing of Mike Brown, a grand jury decided not to indict. We were out on West Florissant, and it was quiet. The buzz started to rise, and we started seeing these young men and a few young women moving from store to store and building by building they went up in flames.
I remember both of us, feeling so deeply hurt and I know for myself on that moment that these young people, our young brothers and sisters didn’t feel like they had any other voice, any other way to lash at the system that has done so much harm to us, but to burn and break glass. We didn’t care about the glass or the building, it’s what’s broken inside of them.
So I wonder in this moment when not only are we dealing with white supremacist violence in churches and we have school shootings, we also have coming out of COVID, our communities have been starved and the death rate in our communities, we think about this violence rising and the suicides rising at the same time.
McBride: At the same time.
Lee: Are we in a political crisis? A moral crisis? They’re all kind of wound up to me. How do we parse through all of this?
McBride: I do think that all of us experience this kind of compounding realities of trauma, based off of where we’re situated. I think it’s very important for us to appreciate that the structure and order of things always lend to us a certain kind of pathway or instruction on our own response, right?
Lee: Mm-hm.
McBride: In our tradition we talked about the body is made up of many parts and the eyes don’t say to the ears, how come I can’t hear in the nose doesn’t say to the mouth, how come I can taste, that many members one body. So I do think it’s very important for us to keep reminding ourselves that it is the collective diversity of our experience, our situatedness in the world that allows us to have a holistic response.
So if you’re proximal to young men and young women who we know are filled with anger, fear rage, rightly so because of the conditions that they live in or the things that have happened to them. The question, for we who are proximal to them, is what, then, is our responsibility to provide a pathway of healing and support and opportunity for them.
If you are a person of wealth in this moment and season and you may find yourself a bit distant from these realities, what is your responsibility to leverage your collective wealth, to make sure that the historical reality of black and poor and under resourced people continue to be connected to your situatedness or are you becoming, as the boy says, the talented tiff that would actually act as very similarly to the wealthy white elites of his day.
Like what is your and our collective responsibility? What is our responsibility to have the right analysis and description of the problem? Again, if we go to Ferguson or we go to the young folks who, as Dr. King says, the riot is the language of the unheard, what are we doing to critique that they can’t be heard by us, not the fact that they’re engaging in rightist behavior, right?
Lee: Mm-hm.
McBride: So it’s really important for us to not become the instrument and the tool for our oppressor even as we acknowledge we have real problems. This is why in this moment as violence is rising as suicides are rising, what are we doing to stem that tide through mental health, public health interventions? Why are we continuing to perpetuate the talking points of our antagonists around we need more cops, when we know cops have never made us safe.
That does not negate the public safety challenges, it rightly built on this continuous struggle for our communities to have investments in healing, public health interventions, investments in the ecosystem of our community. We have clinics that are culturally competent. We have food that is healthy. We have therapists that are culturally relevant. We have institutions that are robust with resources, not just more cops and militarized responses to our very real hurt.
We, as a people, I think, must see where we’re situated in relationship to this collective trauma and ask ourselves, is this the most radical thing I can do in order to heal the hurt of our people to shift the political and systemic structures of our country? What are we willing to do to do that holistic collective work together?
Lee: As you talk about engaging that collective work of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and fellow humans, it’s clear that your faith and how you see your role as a faith leader, you can hear it and feel it. There are other people who use their beliefs and their faith, and they weaponize those in different ways to take rights from people, to inflict harm on people and it’s so bound politically, it’s knotted up.
I wonder in moments like this or any moment for that matter in this country, do we need more religion, more faith or less in terms of the way the machinery actually rolls?
McBride: We need good religion. It’s not about if we need it more or less, we need good religion. We need good faith. We need just religion. We need just faith. We need just resources, just economies. We need just sociology. We need just politics.
The question is never about more or less, it is always about what kind. Of course people can point to faith being used as a catalyst for oppression and imperialism, but so has money and I don’t see people willing to cast their money aside and just share it. It is how do we redeem these cultural and social tools for our existence and survival? How do we redeem them? How do we put them in the service of all humanity for its highest call and purpose?
So, no, I don’t believe we need more faith, I don’t believe we need less faith. I don’t think we need good faith. I think we need good religion. I don’t think we need more politics. I don’t think we need less politics. We need good politics. More or less is needed dependent on how good and how just.
So I’m always hoping that we can hit that tipping point, that tipping point where justice and peace and freedom and healing and self-determination, it can be an expression of goodness. If we need more, it’s because we don’t have enough good expressions of those things.
Lee: We’ll be right back.
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Lee: We went through a really divisive period in the last administration. This one is divisive in different ways, not the same tenor tone and the energy is completely different. But are we any closer to those kinds of ideals today than we were in 2016, 2017, 2018?
McBride: That’s a good question, Trymaine. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to argue against what we have not experienced and so I think all of us agree, another Trump presidency would have been unimaginably bad for everyone, particularly black folks and poor folks and marginalized folks in this country. Having a Biden administration has definitely put some brakes on like this kind of march into the oblivion that I think many of us were literally witnessing.
But it has not eliminated white supremacy. It has not eliminated systemic and structural violence. It has not eliminated the kind of harm that not just Donald Trump, but hundreds of years of anti-black systemic violence is done to us as a community and dare I say to the world. So, are we closer? I don’t know if we’re closer to where we want to be, but I definitely believe that we are not moving in the opposite direction and I think that that is perhaps all we can hope for in this moment while we continue to capture ourselves to regain some solid footing, it is not a done deal.
The verdict is not in if this country is going to be able to emerge from these authoritarian kind of neo-fascist sensibilities that we see happening in other countries. I mean, in other countries, the billionaire class are aspiring to executive power to shrink the influence and the power of the nation states into the hands of wealthy elites. So the United States of America even though we see ourselves as an American exceptionalist nation, we are finding ourselves falling victim to similar geopolitical realities happening in other countries. The question for us is are we strategic enough? Are we connected enough? Can the freedom fighting tradition of the black experience in this country, which is quite unique, than other countries that have fallen susceptible to this, can we figure out a way to build a continuous resistance that continues to expand the circle of belonging to include those who perhaps share some of our same concerns, but understand the unique ways in which they visit black folks, brown folks, Asian folks, Latino, LGBTQ, rich, poor, etc.
So I do think that this is a moment, the Biden administration, it’s a moment for us to catch our collective breath, to kind of reassess where we are, but I do not believe this current political leadership is up to the task of leading us into the future we want to go. I think, hopefully, folks understand their political assignment was to catch us from falling into a freefall into the abyss of the kind of authoritarian efforts that that were really seizing executive power.
Again, I’ll just say it’s not clear if this country is free from that. So democracy is in peril, but at least we have some leadership at the executive level of this country that hopefully is willing to do what we can to stave off what appears to be a free for all, appear to at least on the previous administration.
Lee: One of the things I appreciate about you is every time I’ve been in your presence, I don’t know if it’s faith or that’s your leadership, I just always appreciate just being around you and hearing you speak and everything you’re about. But I do wonder if there are times when you don’t feel so strong, when you feel that the burden is heavy, who do you turn to in those moments and do you often feel like that?
McBride: I feel like that now if I’m going to be quite honest. I came home from Buffalo. I spent about five days in Buffalo, and I came home pretty broken. It was very difficult to see our elders slaughtered in that way, many of whom are a part of my Christian Pentecostal tradition. Pearl Young leaving her prayer meeting to only have her life taken by this very wicked individual. It’s damaged me. I’m very much in pain about it. It’s been very difficult for me to get out of bed. I’ve been home for the last two days. I can’t tell you that I’m not in that place now.
But I also take seriously therapy. I have a therapist that I talked to, I do rely on my faith traditions and prayer. I tried to take time to walk outside and look at the beauty of creation to remind myself that there is a world that is still beaming with beauty in the midst of the ugliness. There is joy out there to be found. We just have to look for it and hold on to it when we find it.
So go see a therapist, find joy, look for the beauty and creation, hug those that love you unconditionally and love them back, take a break and know that the fight will continue only with us being as healthy and wealthy, as spiritually mostly as we can.
Lee: My brother, the good Pastor Mike. Man, I really appreciate your time. These are extraordinarily tough time for all of us and those of us who engage with this material and these ideas. Check on your strong friends, your pastor friends or your journalist friends, because it gets real, brother. But thank you for helping us helping to ground us and make sense to some of this.
McBride: Yes, man.
Lee: Brother, thank you.
McBride: Well, thank you, Trymaine, for having me, blessings to you and all your listeners.
Lee: Thank you. Thank you as always for listening. We hope this conversation brought you some peace or maybe a path forward through whatever you’re feeling right now. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using the handle @IntoAmericaPod or you can tweet me @trymainelee, that’s @trymainelee, my full name. If you want to write to us, our email is intoamerica@nbcuni.com. That was IntoAmerica@NBC and the letters U-N-I.com.
Into America is produced by Sojourner Ahebee, Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, and Joshua Sirotiak. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I’m Trymaine Lee. Take care of yourselves and the people around you. See you next Thursday.