by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 28, 2011 | Entertainment, Feature |
Michael Tait
Michael Tait is lead singer of The Newsboys. He and the Grammy-nominated band performed an electric set at the Jersey Shore Will Graham Celebration in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, last month. Best known as a member of the pioneering Christian rock/rap group dc Talk, Tait’s career in the Christian music industry has been defined by stretching the boundaries of art, faith, and culture. Urban Faith News & Religion editor Christine A. Scheller caught up with Tait as he prepared to take the stage. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Urban Faith: Congratulations on the success of Born Again, your first CD with The Newsboys.
Michael Tait: Thanks. After 44 weeks, we dropped off and then were number one again, so it’s mind-blowing.
Urban Faith: You’ve played with cross-cultural bands pretty much your whole career, right?
Michael Tait: Oh yeah. I call it “living integration.” I want people to see that the beauty of the human race is found in the diversity of the human race. We are God’s bouquet. We could have all white flowers or red, but man, wouldn’t it be pretty to see a bouquet of different flowers, different styles? That to me is the beauty of it.
Urban Faith: You did a lot to promote racial reconciliation when you were with dc Talk. Are you guys still involved with race and justice issues?
Michael Tait: Obviously, dc Talk is disbanded for the moment, or as we say, ‘double-parked in the city’ … but my heart’s always been for racial reconciliation because I grew up in the inner city of D.C. and my dad’s heart was for it.
Urban Faith: My editor wrote a book called Reconciliation Blues about his experience as a black person in the evangelical world. What are your thoughts on that experience?
Michael Tait: It’s funny you should mention that because the other day the band was like, “Tait, you’re like the only black guy in Christian rock.” It’s true. We have Kirk Franklin, who’s my friend, but that’s gospel. In CCM, as broad as it is, I’m the only little spot in that whole conglomeration.
Urban Faith: Did you grow up listening to rock music?
Michael Tait: I grew up listening to Oingo Boingo, U2, and Duran Duran, but also Kool & the Gang, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson. My friends gave me a hard time, but I was like 12 or 13 and I was like, “Forget you guys, man.” In other words, I’m not going to be pigeonholed. I like basketball and soul food, but I also like tennis and sushi — and rock ‘n’ roll.
ROCKIN' DIVERSITY: Tait onstage with the Newsboys at the Will Graham Jersey Shore Celebration.
Urban Faith: In an interview with the Gospel Music Channel, you talked about your sister who died of AIDS after a history of drug abuse and your brother who is in prison for drug offenses. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander talks about the war against drugs as a backlash against the civil rights movement. Do you think structural racism has impacted your own family in this regard?
Michael Tait: Speaking directly, in a real tangible way, no. We weren’t put down or put in jail because of our color, nor did we become victims of HIV because of our color. But I think down the line, in the very nature of racism, most African Americans have been affected by it. Is it an excuse? No, it’s a fact. Should we stop and throw in the towel. No way. I’m not doing that. I want to climb higher. Not everybody has that drive.
The sad part is, because of the system and racism, a lot of families are broken up. That was the whole nature of racism in the beginning, to tear apart families. It’s still going on. That’s the part that’s so bad, because then little Johnny and Stevie and Bernard are alone at home. Mom is working two jobs and dad can’t be found because the world says he’s not worth anything. He’s looked down upon. He feels inferior to others. It’s a stinky mess, so sometimes it’s hard to grasp what to do, but all you can do is take one day at a time and do one act at a time.
Urban Faith: Some Christians have been identified with the “birther movement” that cast dispersions on President Obama’s birth. Would it happen if he wasn’t black?
Michael Tait: I think the bigger issue here is that many of us are not happy with what’s happening in our country under his leadership. That’s going to make us say, “Hey, by the way, you’re not even da da da.”
Urban Faith: Are you speaking of yourself or in general?
Michael Tait: Yes, myself. I’m not satisfied with Obama’s current direction for our country. … The scariest part about it is I’m a Republican, and I’m not sure I see anyone coming up that I can even vote for next time. Who knows, [Obama] might get four more years.
Urban Faith: Another personal question for you. I read somewhere that you have a supermodel in your life.
Michael Tait: Yes, her name is Mari. We met in New York and started dating about a year ago. I’m going to pop the question one of these days.
Urban Faith: In your interview with the Gospel Music Network, you said, “I get lost in church. I can be jaded, go on cruise control. I know the Christian clichés and phrases to say to capture the audience.” That’s a spiritual dilemma. How do you keep going?
Michael Tait: I think it’s mind over matter. … The more real I get every night and the more I get into the Word in my personal life, the more it stays fresh. Otherwise it becomes karaoke. … Also, I look at the crowds and the people. Every state’s different and every situation is different. It’s like God inspires me and fills me in that moment for that work and I feel it every night. So I can say the same thing and God uses it because his Word never comes back void.
by Catherine Newhouse | Jun 17, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
PROBING A BROKEN SYSTEM: Author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander questions the lopsided number of black men in prison.
Forty years ago today, the United States government declared its legendary “War on Drugs,” and our nation has not been the same since—especially if you happen to be an urban male with dark skin.
The Jim Crow laws may have been officially struck down years ago, but author and scholar Michelle Alexander argues that a new racial caste system has grown in its place: the mass incarceration of minorities, particularly African American men.
It’s not a conclusion she reached lightly. As Alexander discusses in her critically acclaimed book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, it took years as a racial justice project director for the ACLU for Alexander to see the eerie similarities between the present U.S. criminal justice system and Jim Crow.
Namely, having a criminal or felony record means you face legal discrimination for the rest of your life. Depending on the type of crime, you can lose some of your rights—including the right to vote—and can be barred from housing, employment, financial aid and public benefits (see this report for details). These consequences have come down the hardest on low-income minority communities. As Alexander points out, law enforcement has unfairly targeted those neighborhoods for drug arrests, despite the fact that minorities do not use or sell drugs more than whites.
As a result, more African American men are in prisons, in jails, on probation or on parole today than were enslaved in 1850, 10 years before the Civil War. And an African-American child has less of a chance of being raised by both parents today than in the age of slavery, both according to Alexander’s book.
In an exclusive interview with UrbanFaith, Alexander called for people to create a major social movement against the new Jim Crow spurred by love for the imprisoned. She drew on Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Strength to Love to discuss the kind of love needed for this movement: a love that is, as King wrote, “not to be confused with sentimental outpouring” or “emotional bosh,” but rather a force that loves in spite of flaws or wrongdoings.
As a person of faith, Alexander said she believes every person is a “precious child of God, deserving of our care, compassion and concern, and to use Martin Luther King Jr.’s term, unsentimental love.” Part of our conversation with her is below.
URBAN FAITH: You say in your book that so few people realize that mass incarceration is a racial caste system. Why do you think that is?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The system of mass incarceration and how it operates much like racial caste system has lived invisibly in our society in large part because prisons themselves are out of sight, out of mind. In the days when there were whites-only signs, people of all races could not help but notice that a caste system was alive and well. Today, people who are sent to prison are shipped off and no longer a part of our consciousness, unless of course they’re a family member or a friend, someone we know well. The communities which are hardest hit are themselves segregated from mainstream society.
If you’re not directly touched by this system of control, it’s very easy to be seduced by the myths we are fed in mainstream media, propagated by shows like “Law and Order” and CNN and MSNBC shows that focus on the most heinous crimes. These media images and narratives reinforce the idea that most people doing time in prison are heinous people who we should be fearful of and have no care, compassion or concern for.
The colorblind rhetoric that has enveloped this system seems quite rational on the surface. The system is officially colorblind and we have been told by politicians, media pundits, even by some scholars, that the reason so many poor folks of color are cycling in and out of the criminal justice system is their own fault, due to their culture and their poor choices. And because it’s due to their individual choices, we need not care about the suffering that they may be experiencing.
Why do you think people should care?
I think the fundamental question posed by this system of mass incarceration is whether we as a nation are willing to see every human being as worthy of our collective care, compassion, and concern. And I believe the fate of poor people of color in this country depends on our willingness to answer that question, ‘Yes.’
Even if their behavior we find objectionable or reprehensible, we will not stop caring. We are capable of the kind of love—what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as unsentimental love—reflected in our policies, practices, our rules of law, our ways of being, structures and institutions. Unsentimental love that keeps on loving, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.
If we continue to look the other way and believe that some people are not worthy of our moral concern, caste-like systems will be a permanent feature of American life. It’s always possible to demonize or criminalize people along racial or ethnic lines to make certain groups of people be viewed in the public eye as bad and wrong. If we allow those kinds of tactics to cut us off from our own capacity for compassion, then we are conceding to a system that is dehumanizing millions.
And we have got to rethink our drug laws, which criminalize and stigmatize people who may well be suffering from drug abuse or addiction. We put them in a cage, brand them as criminals and felons and then subject them to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn and social exclusion. Is that how we would want someone we cared about to be treated? I think the answer is no. It is possible for us to do things differently. In fact, we haven’t always incarcerated such an astonishing percentage of our people.
You say in your book that we need a major social movement in order to truly transform the criminal justice system. From what you’ve seen since you’ve written this book, do you have hope such a movement will start?
I do. I believe that a major movement is possible to end mass incarceration. There are many people who think otherwise. In fact, there were many people who believed in the mid-1950s that Jim Crow segregation in the South would never die, and that civil rights advocates committed to end the Jim Crow system were foolish.
One of the reasons I believe it will take nothing less than a large social movement to end mass incarceration is because, if we were to return to the rates of mass incarceration we had in the 1970s—before the War on Drugs and the ‘get tough’ movement kicked off—we’d have to release 4 out of 5 people in prison today. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would be forced to watch their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our political, social and economic structure that it’s not going to just fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.
But I believe it’s possible. Just as racial justice advocates were able to bring Jim Crow to its knees in a relatively short period of time, it is possible to bring this system to an end as well. Once genuine care and concern are awakened for a population that has been so demonized and stigmatized for so long, the injustice of the legal system that has operated to keep them in their place will become readily apparent to all.
Do you see people having that personal awakening?
Yes, I do. In fact, there are a growing number of African-American churches that are answering the call to engage in movement building work to end mass incarceration. I’m working right now with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, which is a network of progressive black churches across the country that has committed themselves to making ending mass incarceration a number one priority.
My own view is that the faith community has got to play a lead role in this movement, because what it’s going to take to end this system is a real awakening to care, compassion and concern for all of us, opportunities for redemption and pathways home. And people of faith have got to find their voices in this movement. I’m just delighted to see a growing number of people of faith and faith leaders answering the call and the challenge that this moment in history presents.
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 16, 2011 | Entertainment, Feature |
The Book of Mormon, a play by the creators of South Park about two Mormon missionaries to Uganda, won nine Tony awards Sunday night, including Best Musical, but according to an April review that was reprinted at The Root this week, its plot is nothing to celebrate. Observes writer Janice C. Simpson:
If you’re black and your skin is even a little thin, there’s plenty in this show to rub you the wrong way, too. The Ugandans whom the missionaries encounter are plagued by poverty, AIDS and an evil warlord who forcibly subjects women to circumcision. Despite these woes, the villagers are portrayed as good-hearted, if simple-minded, people. One keeps referring to an old battered typewriter as her “texting machine.” Another stomps around talking about raping babies because he believes that doing so will rid him of HIV. A dream sequence is set in hell, where the devil’s main disciples are Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and Johnnie Cochran, who, a song explains, is there for his part in helping to free O.J.
Simpson notes that the material is “played for can’t-you-take-a-joke laughs,” but she didn’t find the subject matter funny.
RACE, RELIGION & SATIRE: The cast of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical "The Book of Mormon" during the show's opening night in March.
“Parker and Stone [the show’s creators], who call themselves libertarians, have gotten away with this kind of cavalier attitude toward serious subjects for years because of their ability to sugarcoat it with faux irony,” Simpson declares before accusing the South Park provocateurs of “indulging in cultural colonialism of the most insidious kind.”
Sure, the head villager is seen as a wise man, and his daughter is the doe-eyed idealist who brings the sides together. But the show doesn’t work unless the villagers are seen mainly as noble savages who need white people to show them the way to enlightenment. And in the end, their salvation comes from believing in the white missionaries who have been dropped into their midst.
At The Grio, Earl Ofari Hutchinson read the play differently, writing today that it “skewers Mormons for the church’s decades of racial prejudice and for their prodigious proselytizing activities in Africa.” Hutchinson said the church’s history will “saddle” Mormon presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman with “the heavy burden of the religion’s racial history,” which he said includes its refusal to publicly apologize for its “long, stubborn, and dogmatic defense of alleged biblical encoded racism.”
Perhaps in anticipation of the musical’s Tony Award domination, Mark Oppenheimer reported on the black Latter Day Saints Genesis Group in his latest New York Times column. Oppenheimer attended a picnic with 300 members of the group in Utah and told stories of how they, as black Mormons, grapple with their church’s history of racial prejudice.
Oppenheimer quotes Max Perry Mueller, who is reportedly writing a dissertation at Harvard on African Americans and the Mormon church. Mueller told Oppenheimer that the Latter Day Saints have “made a very sincere effort” to welcome blacks, but few African Americans have joined. He also said the notion that until recently Mormons were “exceptionally exclusionary or racist is probably unfair” because “while no other large, predominantly white church barred blacks from the clergy in the 1970s, none was particularly integrated or had notable black leaders, either.”
If you’ve seen The Book of Mormon, what do you think? Is it racist, anti-religious, or just an equal-opportunity offender that shouldn’t be taken that seriously?
by Christine A. Scheller | Jun 15, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
Given that court cases claiming reverse discrimination have been litigated since the 1970s, perhaps it’s not surprising that a new study shows whites think they are more discriminated against than blacks. Combine this finding with a host of other new facts and figures, however, and you get a lot of evidence suggesting these whites need a reality check.
The study was conducted by Tufts University psychology professor Samuel Sommers and Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton. They found that both blacks and whites believe racism against blacks has declined in the last 60 years, but whites believe the situation is now reversed, with racism against them surpassing racism against blacks.
In a nation-wide sample of 208 blacks and 209 whites, some 11% of whites gave anti-white bias the maximum rating on the scale, while only 2% of whites gave the maximum rating for anti-Black bias. Sommers and Norton found no significant variation for other demographic factors like respondent age or education. They also said “whites linked lower levels of anti-black bias with higher levels of anti-White bias.”
“This emerging perspective is particularly notable because by nearly any metric—from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education—statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for Black than White Americans,” the researchers concluded.
Coincidentally, last week Gallup published results of a poll that indicated 30 percent of African Americans think unemployment is the nation’s biggest problem while only 19 percent of whites think so. (Senior citizens and those earning less than $30,000 per year also named unemployment as the top problem, while Americans overall said it is the economy in general.)
Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on June 3 that the unemployment rate for May was “essentially unchanged” from the previous month. That rate was 16.2 percent for blacks, 11.9 percent for Hispanics, and 8 percent for whites.
An article yesterday at The Grio reported this rate as a factor in the disproportionate impact of the housing market collapse on African Americans. Other factors include “stricter credit score requirements, a severe decline in loans made to blacks, and predatory lending.”
“After peaking at 50 percent in 2006, the African-American home ownership rate has now fallen to 44.8 percent, Census Bureau data show. By comparison, the home ownership rate for whites in the U.S. is 74.1 percent, and the nation’s overall home ownership rate currently stands at 66.4 percent,” the article said.
Additionally, “The Center for Responsible Lending calculates that about 11 percent of African-American homeowners are in some stage of foreclosure, and that 1.1 million black families will lose their homes by 2012.” If the Qualified Residential Mortgage Rule that is being recommended by Federal regulators is signed into law, buyers will be required to put at least 20 percent down when purchasing a house, sending home ownership further out of reach for many Americans no matter their race, The Grio reported.
Finally, in our statistical mash-up, Psych Central reports that researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California interviewed 1,271 black men and found that they reported better mental health overall than whites, but the kinds of realities reported in these other statistics threaten it.
The National Survey of American Life: Coping with Stress in the 21st Century indicates that “lower socioeconomic standing including lower levels of education, unemployment and poverty were associated with poorer mental health status” in black men, but “only one out of 20 respondents reported major depressive disorder during the previous 12-month period,” and only 3 percent indicated the presence of serious psychological distress. “Overall, these prevalence rates are relatively low compared to non-Hispanic whites,” Psych Central concluded. (It’s important to note, however, that African Americans are less likely to seek and receive quality treatment for mental health concerns.)
Is there anything significant to be derived from the fact that whites think they’re being discriminated against more than blacks, while blacks actually are but report better mental health overall? Tell us what you think.
by Paul Scott | Oct 19, 2010 | Headline News |
The superstar rapper/entrepreneur Jay-Z has generated lots of buzz lately regarding his spiritual beliefs. Is his music satanic? Is he a member of a secret society? Commentator Paul Scott suggests we may be getting distracted by the wrong questions, and that’s exactly how the hip-hop industry wants it.
“Big Ballin’ is my hobby / so much so they think I’m down with the Illuminati.” — from the song “Hot Toddy” by Usher, featuring Jay-Z.
Over the past year, the hottest topic in the hip-hop world has been whether artists such as Jay-Z, Kanye West, and others are part of some diabolical secret society. From street corners to college campuses, people are losing sleep over the question: “Is Jay-Z part of the Illuminati?” The issue has reached such a level that Jay-Z has responded to the accusations on collaborations with Rick Ross and Usher, as well as radio interviews. To add to the controversy, MC Hammer reportedly has jumped on the bandwagon insinuating that Jay-Z is a devil worshiper.
While some of the discussions have been thought provoking, many have done nothing but subject people to the same “spookism” about a devil with a pitch fork and a red suit that they get in many churches. Much of the “spookism” that is being used in regards to the Illuminati is just a mask to divert attention from the real issue, global white supremacy.
The Illuminati was formed May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, with the purpose of organizing a secret society of “enlightened white men” to rule the planet. However, it must be noted that — according to the book Illuminati 666, compiled by William Sutton — Weishaupt has said, “regarding the order, let it never appear in any place in its own name, but always covered by another name and another occupation.” So when an interviewer asks a rapper if he is a part of the Illuminati, the person is really creating a smokescreen to hide the real issue.
What should be questioned is why hip-hop industry insiders from J. Prince, Ice Cube, to 50 Cent have felt compelled to address the issue. If the accusations of something fishy in hip-hop did not have at least a grain of truth, the whole controversy would have been easily dismissed and not dignified with an answer.
There is a term called “limited hangout,” which is defined as “the release of previously hidden information to prevent a greater exposure of more important details.” This is the deception that is transpiring with the hip-hop secret society controversy.
It is often said that if you don’t ask the right question, you cannot get the right answer. The question that should be posed to Jay-Z is not whether he is a member of the Illuminati, but “What does he know about the Illuminati?” Because if he claims that he doesn’t know anything about the order, then he cannot possibly know if he is playing a role in their agenda, can he? Also, the major question should not be whether a rapper is part of a secret society, but what is his relationship with the 10 percent of the population that controls 90 percent of the wealth and how does this affect “the ‘hood”?
The discussion of the role that covert white supremacist organizations have played in the oppression of the non-white people of the planet has been discussed by researchers and conspiracy theorists. However, the issue has been rarely viewed in a hip-hop context, so people have been either unwilling or unable to connect the dots.
We must start by studying the various covert plots to oppress non-white people that were taking place in the United States during the mid-19th century by secret organizations such as the Know Nothing Society and the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner, which included such members as Albert Pike, who according to Michael Newton’s book on the Ku Klux Klan has been “named by some historians as the author of the Klan’s original prescript.”
The same agenda was also being carried out across the Atlantic by European white supremacists, such as Cecil Rhodes who founded the Round Table Group that espoused the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon world domination, including the colonization of Africa. So, perhaps, instead of looking at rappers, we need to be looking at Rhodes Scholars?
Although many of the societies have been based on racism, the motivation has also been economic, as these organizations follow the proverb that “a fool and his money are soon parted.” If you keep the masses ignorant, they can be easily exploited.
Herein, lies the role of hip-hop.
While commercial rappers like Jay-Z may not be card-carrying members of a secret society, it is not debatable that many support global white supremacy by way of “racial shadow-ism,” which Neely Fuller defines as “when victims of racism are directly or indirectly, ‘assigned,’ bribed, coerced and or likewise influenced by white supremacists to speak or act to do harm to other victims of racism.” He says that the reason for this is to cause us to believe that the person acting in a “shadow” capacity is in control, when in actuality he is a mere flunky for the global elite.
Also, while most people reference a Tupac video clip as evidence that he exposed the Illuminati, if one really listens to the clip, Shakur actually denied its existence. In it, Shakur said the only thing that matters is getting money, regardless from whence it came.
There is an old saying that if you want to hide something from a black man, put it in a book. So the information about secret societies that has hip-hop heads buggin’ is not really secret, but can be found in our local libraries. But when you have successfully dumbed down a society, you do not have to really hide the truth, as it can be “hidden in plain sight.”
So if the power of secret societies is keeping the masses clueless, what role does hip-hop play in making ignorance bliss? Frankly, I’m less concerned about Jay-Z being on the cover of Forbes magazine than I am about the “conspiracy” of rappers who are considered too dumb to be in a secret society (such as Gucci Mane and Wacka Flocka Flame) carrying out a mission to dumb down black and urban children.
Our greatest weapon against oppression is knowledge of the truth. Instead of engaging in ghetto gossip and fairy tales, we must encourage people to read. We cannot rely on hip-hop websites and YouTube for our information, but must get our information the old fashioned way — from a book.
We must understand that for those who do not study, everything is a secret. However, for those who diligently seek truth, as Jesus taught: “There is nothing that is hidden that shall not be revealed.”
