Tall Monastic Guy

The Talk: the difference is black & white

At a point in our awkward adolescent years many of us found ourselves sitting on a couch or the dining room table across from our parents in order to have a conversation simply known as The Talk. Even if you didn’t experience the talk in that manner I'll bet you're assuming correctly that what I'm referring to is the uncomfortable conversation between parent and child about the birds and the bees, male and female development, how to responsibly handle those strange urges brought upon you by something adults called raging hormones. 

This week it's been brought to my attention that within many black families there is an altogether different version of The Talk. Beyond issues of sex, black parents often feel compelled to share with their adolescent young men the hard racial realities that come with being a black man in America. This talk may involve the necessary lessons in appropriate behaviors to assume when aggressively approached by white male authority figures, especially law enforcement. This unimaginably tension-filled conversation is one that a loving black parent painfully recognizes could literally result in life or death. 

The Trayvon Martin murder case and the subsequent response by my black male friends, along with prominent public figures such as the Miami Heat basketball team has placed an international emphasis on the ongoing systemic issue of racism within America, an issue that many white males like myself simply have not often been forced to consider.  

As a lanky teenager growing up in a Norman Rockwell-esque Indiana farming community it was common for my friends and I to stay up late, sneak out and run around our small town fearlessly playing pranks on classmates or throwing toilet paper in the trees of our teachers. If the police or a grouchy neighbor would have discovered our "criminal" activities the realistic worst that we could expect was our parents being notified and possibly minor privileges being temporarily taken away.

John Wesley on 'Love of the Other'

The following is from John Wesley, the most eloquent, prolific, and influential evangelist of 18th century England. The title of this sermon is "The Way to the Kingdom,"

Thou shalt love--- thou shalt embrace with the most tender goodwill, the most earnest and cordial affection, the most inflamed desires of preventing or removing all evil, and of procuring for him every possible good - thy neighbor - that is, not only thy friend, thy kinsman, or thy acquaintance; not only the virtuous, the friendly, him that loves thee, that prevents or returns thy kindness; but every child of man, every human creature, every soul which God hath made, not excepting him whom thou hast never seen in the flesh, whom thou knowest not, either by face or name; not excepting him whom thou knowest to be evil and unthankful, him that still despitefully uses and persecutes thee: Him thou shalt love as thyself, with the same invariable thirst after his happiness in every kind; the same unwearied care to screen him from whatever might grieve or hurt either his soul or body.

(Source: The Sword of the Lord by Andrew Himes)

the invitation of the wilderness...

At the moment I’m afforded a couple hours to write and read while sipping my americano in one of Denver’s massive sea of coffee establishments. Technically, I am working. It just looks and perhaps feels different than the job that occupied my father’s time and far different from the job and sense of desperation experienced by his father.

I’m among several coffee-consuming peers in this place who are pressing keys on laptop computers, checking and sending email or leisurely updating our favorite social media, which of course we can also do on our mobile devices when we walk out the door. 

A window separates me from a cocktail of local and non-local tourists walking alongside a noticeably increasing population of the wandering poor. I fully inhale this scene with its distinct urban rhythms and tempo. I observe the obvious crescendo of technologies and a mobility by which folks seem to relate to few things and often times few persons for very long periods of time.