I read it and then just started writing this…
Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child…A Long Way From Home…
This spiritual strikes deeply at the heart of African American Alienation…
We were born here…
We didn’t choose to come here…
African Americans are not fully African…
Most of us have no idea what parts of Africa our linage comes from…
Most of us have had that robbed from us…
We don’t know the culture…but our seekign the symbolism of Africa (I’ve done this to..as you can see in the logo of SoulPreaching.Com.
Our African sisters and brothers who come to this country can say they are from Ghana….they are from Kenya…they are from Ethiopia…etc…
But what can we say? Where is our home?
We may say Detroit….We may say Atlanta….we may say New York…
But we are often reminded that we are not fully American either…
When All you ssay is “Black lives matter” and even your Christian brothers and sisters compare you to the KKK…
That ain’t home…
When unarmed blacks are killed and you complain and even your Christian sisters and Brothers want to change the suject to Black on Black crime…as if black criminality exonerates Police misconduct….
We are reminded we ain’t home…
So here we are as DuBois reminded so many years ago….not American…not African….
But there is one place…A place that began in the Bush Harbors…
A place that sustained us during the depths of Jim Crow…
A place that is by no means perfect, but aided in all of our struggles for liberation…
That place…
The Black Church…
That was home…
Now, I do not wish to minimize the complex nature of the interaction that many have had with the church…
The Black church, like the church in general, grapples with its own problems…
We grapple with the role of women in the church…
We grapple with the treatment of some weak members…
We must admit that it is not everybody that has a liberative interaction with the church…
We have cliques like everybody else…we sometimes alienate folks even here…
So we are not everything we should be…
like any home…we don’t treat everybody as we should…but it is a home…our home…
It was a place where we could put our feet up and lean back in the chair….
It was a place where we didn’t have to worry about laws and rules placed on us by those who didn’t understand where we coming from…
It was a place where salve was applied to the recipients of racism…
It was a place where we didn’t have to defend the statement “We matter.” like we have to do everywhere else…
It is home…
Home got problems like everywhere else…but when all else fails…we always try to go back home…
The Black church is not just about worship style…
It’s not just about music….
It’s not just about an entertaining preacher…
It is a place outside of our cookouts, family reunions…that African American’s can go Home…
this rally hit me as I was waiting for my car to have some work on it…
Another African American came up…and we started talking…
And that little room we were in was suddenly transformed…
Into Home….
We talked a little about basketball…
We talked a little about politics…
I know we were working off of a multitude of assumptions that racism has placed in us…a multitude of assumptions that hurts have placed on us…a common belief that we are somebody…we matter…and we don’t have to argue or debate over it…
Every week…we come together and worship the Lord…and praise and sing…But we also have a little slice of home…
So it may take a little longer than other folks…(and I sometimes get a slight agrivation about this)…
We may have to listen to Sister Betty clamor on about her week during the offertory time…
But it’s home….
The Black Church is home…
You can come to my home if you want…
I invite you to it…but remember….this is somebody’s home when you get there…
I know…I know..millennials question everything as they should. They want us to tell them WHY..and they should…Generation Xers like myself ain’t done enough passing on….and the Boomers didn’t pass on enough to us either…
But
My sisters and brothers….don’t give up your home so quickly…cause you are gonna miss it when it’s gone…
And when it’s gone…I really hope and pray that what you are seeking to replace it with is also home…
Where oppressed people don’t have to argue about whether racism even exists and can get to applying the salve so that those people can make it another day…