Reading While Black: A Conversation with Dr. Esau McCaulley

hey saints and names welcome to 30 minutes with the perry what's good how y'all doing how you doing my name's jackie hello perry my name is preston perry what's your middle name um it starts at the end what is it none of your business [Music] that wasn't funny i'm supporting them though i'm supporting i'm the guest i gotta laugh at all right i can see why he thought it was funny but we do have a guest with us here his name is esau professor esau macaulay dr esau what else you got this is esau be fine well your professor you people got to respect you because you you respect my name now if you know anything about anything you already know esau but if not tell us who you are i don't need to introduce you i'm an associate professor of new testament at wheaton college i'm a contributing opinion writer for the new york times i have three books only two of which anybody might have read the second book is called reading while black african-american biblical interpretation is an exercise in hope and the third book is a children's book called jose johnson's hair and the holy spirit and i have no idea when this podcast is going to drop but it came out made the 10th yesterday as of right now now this this wasn't i didn't even think to ask this question until you introduce yourself do you have anybody in your family that like puts a little before your stuff no it is and underneath it is a bit of pride but we don't want you to feel that yeah yo you ain't all that with your little book it's like it's the main one your little articles with the new york times okay so esau we saw each other a couple weeks ago and we talked about how you released an article on easter yeah and i made the it wasn't a mistake oh it's kind of well stopped i'm joking joking but i retweeted it with the quotation from the article where you said that when my body is raised it will be a black body now i thought that was the least controversial it's like i'm black of the article because i'm just affirming or you're just affirming that we will be raised as our selves like yes our ethnicity doesn't doesn't go away but people were so angry with me yeah people people getting their feelings people got in their feelings about me saying that i ruined easter i missed the point of the resurrection you know i was like i didn't think i put him back in the tomb i thought he was risen in my article um i can say a lot about that i can say a lot about that one of them is like how how we talk about christian truth you know there's certain things that like everybody affirms you know about the resurrection anyone who's an orthodox christian under a frame things like the resurrection of the body but i think that sometimes people don't always consider like what does it mean to apply a text to particular groups of people and so the point of the article was the following historically in america black bodies have been devalued this isn't even that controversial right from slavery through the jim crow through all of these things the black body was was devalued and so what i was actually pushing back on was the denial of the resurrection of the body in other words this idea that when you die your soul goes up to heaven and you you're in a better place that's the end of the story i said that's insufficient because black people you imagine all these pictures of lynchings where they literally hang and burn a black body well that was the final statement on earth about this person's body so the question then goes well what does god think about that statement does god think about what happened to that body was good and just well the resurrection of the body is a rejection of the evil done to that black body so that when this body is resurrected and it comes back as black it's saying that this thing that you tried to destroy and devalue god himself values and one of the things and how to get into it because this is the new york times we can't do chase all these bible things down the road but one of the things he talks about in the book of revelation is god will wipe away every tear from our eyes before we come into the new creation so in other words the bible depicts this idea that when we are raised from the dead we actually don't forget all about trump it doesn't say that it says that god ministers to our trauma for the final time before we enter the kingdom of god well then i need to ask people this question what will black resurrected people be possibly traumatized by potentially racial trauma in other words god ministers to that racial trauma then he ushers us into the kingdom and so i think that what people really don't like is when we start asking the question how does this general truth for christianity broadly sometimes touch the particular needs of black people now i want to say is with as much love and caution as i can that rule is almost only in place for black people this is what i mean when i say that so when you're sitting there at a wedding or at a youth retreat or at any other kind of subgroup of people we say how does this text speak in particular to young married couples in other words if you're at a retreat and there's 25 young two to three people and you have a bible text you're asking a particular question how does this bible text touch this married couple now if you were dealing with people who are widows same text you preach it differently so we actually understand what it means to shape a sermon they're still biblically faithful to the particular needs of the community but it's only the case when we started talking about how does christianity touch the particular issues of black racial trauma that people get in their feelings and the reason people get in their feelings is because they feel sometimes implicated in the racial trauma in other words when i say this is how the gospel speaks to the things that black people have experienced they have to then reflect upon what actually happened to black people in america which then may raise issues of guilt or whatever is going on but that's not my problem my problem is i want to say something that helps a particular community while not denying this universal the universal implications of the gospel which we actually do which we actually do for every other stuff i mean from children to marriage to divorce to grief everybody gets their own ministry except for black people yikes y-i-k-e-s wow but also too and i want you to speak to this because i think now when we're such a a unique time in which race and culture when it's talked about it's almost deemed as like a no-no like like certain certain certain circles in christendom are being conditioned and being taught that to talk about race is literally you veering away from the gospel or you not um trusting in the scriptures and you're putting your race over the scriptures and so i guess for those people who who've been who are being conditioned to think that man if i bring up race i'm not talking too loud if i talk about race or if i hear somebody talking about race yeah the first thing they think about is man this person or this person thinks about his race race race race race can you talk to those type of people yeah i think that um one of the things that i'll say to those people is that we sometimes we too often and i'm speaking from experience people use the language of stick to the gospel once again only when it deals with issues of race and what i want to do is i want to i was always going to sometimes step back and speak via analogy so for example you can say you know you could be a couple that really really loves jesus but your your financial history can be jacked up and you can be super converted and still not know how to handle money until the church says you know what we're not just going to preach the gospel to you we're going to tell you how the implications of the gospel impacts your money you could be you could you could be a group of people who really love jesus you could be converted but you actually don't know how to talk to one another they communicate healthily in a relationship because he said you know what i know you saved now i'm gonna disciple you on communication in other words we are always as a church thinking about how the gospel actually hits flesh with particular issues same thing in parenting just because you saved you don't get the holy spirit don't automatically teach you exactly how to parent right because you inherit all of the dysfunctional parenting habits that you might have passed and we said you know what we need to have a retreat get these parents together so they don't jack their kids up so the question then becomes when we say just preach the gospel we tend to believe that racism is the only sin that disappears magically a conversion or maybe it's possible that you inherited and this is hard to hear stereotypes ways of thinking ways of acting that may not be in accord with the gospel and what you actually might need to do in the same way that you need to read and figure out how to be a christian parent how to be a good christian spouse how to manage your money as a christian that you need to think intentionally and theologically about race racism and its impact on people now the other thing that i want to say and this is actually i had a really nice white student come up to me and ask me this question genuinely genuinely good kid he said i was talking to my black friend about race and i just want to make sure he doesn't get like too much into his race if he stays focused on jesus and i say okay man why don't we take a step back and like look at the history of the church and say like what has actually caused more damage in the history of the church black people care too much about their race or anti-black racism in christianity in other words like we tend to be afraid of the last of the smaller problems now before we got into this super kind of controversial moment kind of in the church i think you know this black people used to talk about black people who too into being black like we used to joke about folks who like super woke it was a whole meme before woke became a political thing like man listen you can't be conscious everything ain't the system right right so we had a way of actually dealing with that in-house we knew people who was like breakfast yeah you know and like why is this bacon this black the man did everything you remember like see before when that like thing i'm blacking black black so we've had we've had in the black community an ongoing conversation about being excessively conscious yeah so we actually police this in our community the idea that somebody outside of our community can say that you're being too black in a context where like black cultural expression is often minimized seems to be super problematic and so what i would say what i think that they believe is that like if you if you downplay if we downplay our blackness then we will have a unity that kind of emerges naturally what actually happens is would this all conform into white culture and since they don't recognize white culture as a particular culture we just think that we're all unified and i love listen i i love i and i'm not one of those people who only like kirk franklin i love kurt he's the goat like that's not that's my lane but i i i could take i could take a worship song but i can do both right i can do a good worship song or gospel but if you're saying the requirement for us to be unified in christ is to adopt only one particular cultural form then that's colonialization and i know that sounds hard but it's actually true if you think what is normal is what you do in the majority culture and the unity means everybody else adjusting to you then that's not unity that's actually colonizing people's culture and the whole point of the gospel is that we that the gospel transforms culture and then each one of those cultures offer those gifts to god and so the reason why i'm not willing to let go of my culture is because god made me black on purpose and that a redeemed black culture is a gift to the body of christ that nobody else can give and so if you eliminate my culture you eliminate the work that the gospel has done in my culture so i'm fighting for not an exclusive black context but the gifts of black christians to give to the body of christ so you wrote reading while black everybody liked it right and it's i believe the premise of the book is teaching people or like exalting that we need to all have not all have but black biblical interpretation is a thing right yes why did you think that that was necessary to even write a book about well a couple of things one is i had in mind i was i was living in the uk at the time and i saw a lot of the stuff that was going on with a lot of the protests in like 2016 2015 2014 2013 and i remember people saying this was not your parents civil rights movement and i was like man these are black people who are saying this and i was like man the african-american christian tradition has often been on the side of justice not an enemy of justice and so i wanted to write a book that articulated like how african americans came to the conclusion that the bible was a friend not a foe on the pursuit of liberation but another thing that was kind of under undergirding all of that is in a lot of the african-american kind of theological enterprise one of the normative um ideas that is called card herman dude to suspicion which is mean that you have to kind of wrestle liberation from the text that is not there that you're gonna have to read against the grain of the text to find freedom and i'd actually been raised to trust the scriptures and by trusting the scriptures find liberation and so i wanted to write a book that that had at its edit center kind of like what i believe the african-american posture towards scripture they were normative in most of the black churches that i knew and most of the black churches that i knew in alabama and the south growing up we love the bible but we also believe that in that bible it spoke about the essential worth of all people and that god didn't enjoy it the god wasn't in favor of what happened to us and god was on the side of people like martin luther king and his liberative work so that was like the the the origin of it and that's relates to african-american biblical interpretation people get mad when they talk when i talk about this and they kind of go what does skin color got to do with biblical interpretation aren't you making everything racial this is one again when they call me a heretic let me explain to people what i mean um first i want to say is to talk about to talk about being black what does it mean to be black i don't actually argue that like having dark skin makes you a certain interpreter of the bible it doesn't like create these magical interpretive insights but what i do say is they're kind of common not universal common experiences that go along with being black in america we kind of experience certain things and this collective experience raises certain questions that we then bring to the biblical text and then in bringing those black biblical questions those black those questions arise from being black to the biblical text trusting in god to give us an answer and the fruit of that is what i call black biblical interpretation one of the enough examples that i use all the time is i don't know any like white churches that have to actually consistently deal with this idea it's christianity white man's religion because they don't that's not a a critique for them but if you're black growing up you got to know what the bible says about you know the bible not being desperate until that's one example um one of the other things that i say and this is really important to understand this is the only way to describe it the best way to describe it historically there are times of the debates going on in america um during the abolitionist period and then during again during the civil rights period and other points in history and there was one group of people who were saying the bible supports slavery and we should enslave all these black people and this these are the biblical reasons why and then there was a big clump of black people who started historically black churches who answered and said no that ain't what the bible say and so there is a historical group of people who are called i mean they were called black churches while the black churches exist black churches existed sorry to give you history on top of history it said well they were literally kicked out of white churches so the best descriptor for these churches that were kicked out of white church they have to find their own denomination so they can worship god freely with black churches those black churches read the bible differently than majority white churches and there's a historical record you can go back and look and say oh black people say during the slavery time well white people stand in the slavery time and so when i talk about african-american biblical interpretation i talked about first of all the literary deposit what did we say at these different points of controversy and what kind of habits of bible reading arose from having to answer black questions they've been encountered in kind of racist churches so african american biblical interpretation then is the african-american method of finding freedom through trusting the scriptures that has that is kind of marked black christianity in america throughout time and once again i like to give people like history because this is important and i can can i can i be nervous for one second jack go ahead professor okay these are the people so this is what i'm talking about so anybody who studied the reformation i know i don't know how nerdy your listeners are they will say okay this is what was going on in germany you studied the reparation reformation jackie okay so they say okay this is this is going on in germany this is what luther was going through this is what luther is experiencing and these experiences the luther had in germany with the catholic church led luther to read the bible in a certain way and see in the bible god's grace in other words everybody understands that luther's theology was came out of a certain context but was nonetheless true and the luthers theology was informed by his experiences so in other words somebody else he didn't experience what luther had experienced may not have come up with a doctrine of grace but although that was a unique german experience that luther had he still nonetheless spoke a theological truth and so if you believe in the reformation you believe the social location can give rise to theological truths that are universally applicable so what i want to say then is the african-american biblical interpretation comes out of a particular set of circumstances that are nonetheless universal and applicable to other people the other thing that i would say is that anybody who studies theology recognizes that cultural temperaments influence how theology is done in other words british theology is actually a little bit different than german theology which is a little bit different than what they're doing in the scots in other words they have things like the journal of scottish theology and nobody says stop talking about race and start talking about scottish theology no one says stop talking about british theology no one actually says stop talking about german theology we all recognize that those are traditions the difference is we tend to think that america only has one theological tradition and it doesn't it has sub-traditions and african-american theology and biblical interpretation is a sub-tradition last i mean even australia anybody knows that australian evangelicalism is different than what we're doing here and so we recognize cultural difference and how that influences truth they can nonetheless be universally applicable but only black people aren't allowed to have a particular culture that gives things to the wider body of christ because we're the ones you're talking about race but it's a rule that is uniquely given to us uh so my question is what do you think that stems from uh like this this this idea that american christians all have to conform to one style of worship to one way of thinking when uh america is a plethora of different cultures and you know people groups i think i think at the heart of it in the most generous interpretation it's this idea that the best way to solve race is the race issue is to not it's got to be colorblind in other words if i don't acknowledge difference then i can't judge in the basic difference and so i just won't take it into consideration and so i think that people think that they're trying to solve the problem by by kind of not acknowledging race and i think that that that has historically um not been helpful as far as helping us overcome i mean if you imagine if something ever something bad happened in your family two or three years ago the best way to solve it is to say we're never going to talk about it as a family the best way to solve it is to talk through it and figure out what happened what went wrong and how can we avoid doing those things again and i do think that there is another truth that we have to acknowledge if we are we're being intellectually honest and i think this is once again one of the interesting hard parts about these kinds of conversations that people don't understand what actually happens in black communities what we actually talk about there are blood there are people who talk about race in ways that are helpful and there are people who talk about race in ways that are like spiritually destructive and so in other words there are people who say christianity itself is so irredeemably racist or whatever that we the black people shouldn't be christians i think i think that there are people who have spoken about race in ways that aren't helpful and and they've used not used i mean that's the wrong word one of the things that i'm really sympathetic to is people who experience racial trauma in other words i can't i mean i've i'd lament people who walk away from the faith i'll admit anybody walks away from the faith but i understand the frustration with christianity that causes them to question the things that they believe and so what i want to say is if there's someone who's racial trauma has had has sent them hurtling away from the faith the solution to that isn't to say your trauma isn't that bad we united in christ the solution to that is to say here's how the gospel ministers to your trauma and here's how the gospel provides you with something more than retribution and so i think that some people are so afraid of dealing with the ministry reality of the church's racial history and they can't imagine a kind of biblical faithfulness on the other side of these hard questions and one of the things that i say for good or bad and the black church isn't perfect we've got our own dysfunctions and those other things but we've always known how to be christian while being deeply disappointed with other christians it is one thing we specialize in is that we know what it's like to follow jesus when everybody around us who calling his name ain't serving him and so this idea that that we can't as a as a church fully own the evil and the wickedness and the things we've done in the name of jesus and then on the other side of that reckoning still be biblically faithful and theologically sound it's something that people can can't imagine they think if i acknowledge these things then i'm going to people are going to lose the faith but what i want to say is what was done in the dark needs to be the lights need to be turned on and after the lights are turned on yes we will see the evil church is done we also see the goodness of god shining through as well i want to come back to the this this black biblical interpretation thing because i i think the part of it that's really intriguing to me is how people really don't know or perhaps don't have the tools to identify the frameworks or the biases that they bring to passages and having a framework and having a bias isn't even necessarily a bad thing i think it becomes bad when you don't see it so even something small like a couple days ago i'm studying first samuel 1 because i have to do this bible study on prayer and stuff like that and i was reading about hannah and how i said hannah had no children and i'm looking at commentaries and literally it's as if like nobody really lands or stays on the fact that hannah is barren they just move past that and go into you know elkanah's genealogy and uh polygamy and i was just like huh i think i care about her barrenness as an implication of what it was like to be a woman because i'm a woman right and so i'm asking questions of this text because i'm a woman with friends that are barren and all of that and i was just like huh even the commentaries are affected by people not identifying their frameworks so and here's the thing that i think people don't understand about this your experiences lead you to ask questions that the text itself can answer in other words you're not like distorted in the text you're saying no no people who don't have these experiences are down playing them i'll give you an example i won't cite this person's name i'm reading this commentary and he's talking about a slave passage this is true god bless this this brother and he said um well during the ancient world most people were free at the age of 35 or whatever so slavery wasn't that bad and then in a footnote we're gonna leave that to the side that was the first part we're gonna we're gonna let that we're gonna let that ride okay but it got it gets worse than the footnote the footnote said like and i quote something along the lines of except for women most of them weren't free let's say i said wait a minute that's half the population so you do but he it didn't even it didn't even like it didn't even register to him that he was trying to make this point that for men this would be really good he kind of goes but women didn't get that benefit so he could have kept that whole little part to himself another part i was reading this commentary i think he was talking about the good samaritan a different commentary or something he said there are certain groups of people who like as soon as you see them he's trying to apply the text as soon as you see them you start to get nervous kind of like somebody from the middle east and i was like well no if you had asked me as a black man from the south who was the person who like initially kind of gets my nervousness up it would have been a different analogy in other words i don't think we often realize how much our interpretive commentaries have as their target people who they're applying the text to kind of the white middle class who and so like and that has a distorting impact on the things that are emphasized and the things that are downplayed that are in the text themselves or how the text is applied i remember i remember um one of the things in my book and i was so mad about this there was two parts in the book in the chapter on black identity there's two parts of the story that i didn't even know until i was literally researching the book one of them was when i was talking about ephraim and nasa and i don't know they've been they haven't read that chapter uh i knew about it but no one ever applied it to me that like abraham's sorry um joseph's two sons who were then adopted into the nation of israel were half egyptian and half jewish and that when he when when when joseph brings his two his to his two his sons to his father the father says god made a promise to me you're gonna make me a father of many nations therefore i'm going to take these two kids effort manasseh and i'm going to adopt them into the 12 tribes in other words joseph's father said because of these boys ethnicities because i see ethnicity i want to adopt these boys and they africans and nobody ever said well how might this apply to a young brother of african descent who's running by this place in the kingdom of god the other thing i'm reading listen i'm going through the commentaries and the commentaries mention that yeah they're you know half egyptian none of them lands it the other one is and this is also in the book when he says after the after the plagues in the in the people of israel um are leaving egypt there's this line in there where um the writer says a mixed multitude went up with them and i was like what is that mixed multitude they have to get back in my hebrew the mixed multitude means different ethnic groups that's the word means so the bible's sitting there telling you where are they they in egypt these are african peoples who are in the twi who who said you know what they looked at the 12 tribes they said you know what i want that god not your god so after the plagues a bunch of african people said we're going with them and so these are things that are actually in the text that scholars for the most part have had haven't had uh they haven't been concerned with these issues like ethnic identity because that's not a question for them and so the reason that black people interpretation is helpful not because we distort the text but we find things other people might not find because you're not looking for them it's the same thing with women right women can see things in the text that we might not notice unless we really because it might not be a concern for me i had sorry this may be too much information but i had a student who just gave a paper and she was talking about some of the menstruation um in leviticus and she started going through like you know the woman's cycle and all of this other stuff and i had never considered how all of this stuff landed because i never had a cycle before and so she she was walking through the text and so all these ways in which the whole point that i think is we think that like we don't need each other and i want to believe that we all need each other to properly discern the mind of christ different cultures bring different insights that as long as we're committed to the authority of scripture we can then judge according to what the text says and see if this insight is actually good or bad this is why we say diversify your library your commentaries your sermon your uh seminary course book thing what do you call them things what you call them the little thing syllabus here's the thing here's the thing i love god's church and i love the american church but i think one of the one of the things that the american church do when we think about diversity we only think about skin color and so a lot of these churches will try to diversify a church and by putting black white asians or whatever but the moment somebody coming who's culturally or from the hood you know what i'm saying they don't really know how to accept and so i think i think trying to make people conform to one way of thinking it can be diversified all it is but if you don't have a plethora of different cultures well that's diversity though yeah that's true so you're saying we need we need to articulate what diversity is absolutely because somebody might say my church is diversified i have black whites is y'all books diversified yes yeah that's that's that's the question yeah one of the one of the hard things to do is to have a this is hard to have these conversations in public there is no we all know that there's no one single essence of blackness that everybody who's black agrees for sure there isn't like a monolithic blackness and so but we also recognize there's like cultural norms right there's kind of habits and ways of being the culture being a part of the black community and so when you talk about what happens a lot is that man this is going to be complicated people say that we just can't find the right fit and what that often means we want to find a black person who thinks like we do so we can have a black person up front who doesn't like challenges that's what i meant that's what i meant and so even if you don't completely agree with everything that the black community says if you're raised in it and shaped in it you intuitively go understand and so this is what i say this all the time people who want to diversify their staff sometimes the very black person that you're trying to find who makes you feel comfortable is it going to connect with the black people you're trying to reach and so that's the hard part because like if you're uncomfortable that's probably the black person who everybody would be like yes that's somebody who we actually i was going to say that's the reason why certain black people in certain white spaces are so exalted right i'm trying to leave see and this is hey man we can take it there we could take it no we can't yeah we can no we can't i'm taking it there esau here this is the conversation i want to say it's complicated and well i didn't want to essentialize blackness right so that anybody who disagrees with us ain't authentically black black people are as diverse as any other culture we have people who have a variety of opinions the question is who chooses who speaks for us in other words it's one thing for me to notice yeah this is the brother who i've met in the streets and i've seen him but don't nobody listen to this brother but if everybody if somebody from outside of our culture goes this is the black person who gets it that's when it becomes problematic then i gotta say well hold on i'm not questioning his blackness or her blackness i'm saying nobody or 95 of us would come to a different conclusion and if you want to have and it's not my job it's not my job as an african-american to respond to the black person that you like absolutely and and that's the only thing that i want a lot of you know my white brothers and sisters and white evangelicals to understand that if you that that you you can't you can't say in one sense oh it's all about race but then think that if you find a black person who thinks it's not all about race that is that it's not all about race but if you find a black person who who thinks like you then that person is qualified to speak on the whole of black people totally or because in that way you've made it totally by race it's like no like what you just said is very important it's like man like why can't we choose who kind of speaks for black culture or black people you know what i mean and i think if we choose it i think they'll be able to learn from people like me and like you and i think it's also posture in other words like if you put like five black people in a room and on a panel and it's a black audience from black communities everybody's gonna know kind of where the community stands and if you're coming from a minority position it's gonna change how you talk in other words you're not going to talk like everybody's on your side and everybody disagrees with you it's ridiculous you're going to have to have at least a posture because i know sometimes i will push back on you like common ideas in the black community but i know what i'm doing that right i know when i'm doing that so one of the things for example in reading while black the hermeneutic of trust the idea that the bible itself as written leads to liberation it's not the normal disposition of of all black academics so i knew that that part of the book was going to be controversial people are going to love the liberation part they weren't going to love the repent of your sins to be saved and follow jesus and pursue holding this part so i knew as that book traveled into a black community that part of the book was going to be complicated so i spoke in such a way to say here's why i'm doing that i think that in in the same way if you are a black person speaking in a majority white setting you have some responsibility to accurately communicate the opinions of the community that you can represent and when you and when you separate yourself from that and you have your own take you need to offer to take with some humility that's excellent and especially and when i say this i mean i'm talking about black people who love jesus and love the scriptures like you do who disagree and so um that's and i try to be i try to as a writer and as a thinker be as clear as i possibly can what i'm doing me versus when i'm articulating kind of the heart of what our community has always believed i mean you said it all professor i guess we could we could end with this you got a new book about uh the holy ghost and black people black girls yes yes people like if you if you hold on i need to warn them if they didn't like the easter article don't buy this no i love them and i love it because i read it with my daughters because now when i get books my oldest is seven she can read and so i'll have her read it to me and her sister and i guess having her read words that i haven't considered that she hasn't read like pentecost you know it was like nations tribes tongues flames of fire and i was like oh axe is really like creative when you when you think about it but but then my four-year-old almost four-year-old she didn't care nothing about the words but she looked at the picture she said her hair like mine and i was like wow that's like really special to not only have this communication of the holy spirit and dwelling all peoples and nations and tongues and things but even to have like this this illustration that looks like my children like obviously that was intentional with you right yeah yeah well a couple of things i i told them that i wanted a black woman to illustrate it because i knew that she could draw the hair yeah um and what i think and this is probably my maybe my whole life ministry is kind of i don't say summed up in that book but i feel like there's certain places where you can go to get black cultural affirmation in a certain place where you can go to this spiritual affirmation and i want to put things to put these things together i'm not the only person who does it i'm not talking about that what i'm saying is i wanted both of those experiences to kind of be there for parents they could actually have a book that has pictures that look like them that talks about the gods they worship at the same time and we all listen i love you know i love super book and i love all these little cartoons everybody is white that's fine god could use that too but my daughter needs to see somebody who looks like her trying to follow jesus too and so even if even if nobody buys it but your daughter and she had that experience then i think i think i did my job and we buy your publisher senate but i will i you was arguing with me about holding it now i'm like i'm trying yeah for free i know i feel like i feel like my friends i feel like if there's somebody whose work i support y'all can get 20 of my dollars so everyone who emails me and says esau can i send you this influencer box so like nah y'all keep the box i'll buy it or send it to somebody else all right never said i just feel like because like each little each little like cell means something right yeah it does i feel like and i feel like you're not securing the bag by me taking the picture in the box but every sale that you make then you can say i sold this much that means they got a pay jacket more for the next book so i feel like i'm contributing towards like your future sales this is a learning a learning uh thing for some people who want me list securing the bag means securing how much money you make you see it's not all about color it's about coaching raising the raising the amount of the carrying the bag means about like keeping getting all the money omg yes so now the reason i said this this is this people don't understand this this just don't understand people who maybe they don't care about this but i care about this i know people say that you should you should support black writers and those things y'all really should because if you buy the books then the publishers have evidence that these books sell and then more produced so every single cell is literally not just a deposit into someone's bank account it's a deposit into the creation of a culture so i'm glad the reason why black so not before me because i'm gonna be fine i'm all right but that's it people looking for the next reading while black not for me but from some other like writer and people tend to think the black books don't sell so if you if i sell black books then that means somebody else can sell black books so i consider it like doing whatever i can to create i support the creation of a market so there's an ecosystem of black work and sorry this this isn't this wasn't in the podcast i'm going to say this no it's necessary what happens though this happens a lot especially can i just say like orthodox judicially minded whatever you want to call what we're about it's for a long time our voices were suppressed and then people say well i can't find any books like this that's like because y'all fired us every time we start talking about jesus and race right and so then you only allow us certain kinds of black art to to be produced the black legend will be produced and then that creates a it reinforces the stereotype so and so then when you have someone like you or others who produce the books we got to support them so that there is a the breadth of the black christian tradition is is accessible in print to people and so i'm passionate about it um it's one of the things that that if i could do nothing else is that i really want to support black writers and black artists to continue to produce things that i think our life given to our culture awesome well well thank you professor esau this was very you were informative and frank and smart you should write a book too next you're next i'm writing the book right now okay then what's it called no nevermind don't tell us yet we're not ready he don't even know i don't know what it's called yet but i know what the topic is and i'm gonna think of it okay all right brother i'll talk to you later all right

Channel: With The Perrys

Views: 45,092

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Id: 1PuakeWn980

Length: 41min 45sec (2505 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022