The One You Feed - Danté Stewart on Faith, Identity, and Finding a Voice

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Danté Stewart is a speaker and a writer whose work in the areas of race, religion, and politics has been featured on CNN and in The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Comment, and elsewhere. He received his BA in sociology from Clemson University and is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In this episode, Eric and Dante discuss his book, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American EpistleBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Danté Stewart and I Discuss Faith, Identity, Finding a Voice, and…His book, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American EpistleLearning to care for ourselves as a whole person and not just the individual parts of usHow it’s easy to allow our work to mask who we really areHis experience of spending time in and assimilating to the predominantly white church and cultureThe tension he felt between his different social identitiesThe paradox of being visible and invisible when you’re a marginalized personHow he needed to learn to give voice to his psychological pain, struggle, and rageThe issue with current value systems and social constructs that view white dominance as the normHow he has learned that there isn’t just one answer, but many answers to how we can become a better version of ourselves both as individuals and communitiesHis CNN article, “We Redefined Blackness as a World and a Gift”Art is about taking intangible dreams and making them tangible out in the worldFinding wholeness is about trying to make sense of the past in order to create a better futureHow his writing is how he can give voice to what he’s feelingComparison is the thief of creativityThe importance of creating as it is what makes us come aliveDanté Stewart links:Danté’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Danté Stewart you might also enjoy these other episodes:Racialized Trauma with Resmaa MenakemDeep Transformation with Spring WashamSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

that oftentimes we compare ourselves with the worst in ourselves and the best in other people. And when we do that, we will always look down on our journey. We will always diminish how much we've changed. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dante Stewart, a theologian, essayist, and cultural critic. His work has appeared on CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. Dante received his BA in Sociology from Clemson

University and is currently studying at the Chandler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, Dante and Eric discuss his book, Shouting in the Fire, an American Epistle. Hey, Dante, welcome to the show. Hey, what's up, man? It's good to be with you. We're going to be talking about your book, Shouting in the Fire, an American Epistle, among other things. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a

bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? Yeah, wow. That is actually a great, great parable. And the immediate thing that comes to mind is back in college at Clemson University, where a similar story was told about investment, about whatever investment that we make in our bodies and in our minds, in the things that we're doing outside in the world is eventually going to come out. And whichever one gets fed the most is the one who's going to endure the longest.

So we think about running. I just got finished working out, cycling actually. I just got finished cycling. And whenever I'm cycling, it's always like my ability to be strong long is dependent on what I ate 30 minutes ago or what I ate an hour ago. And so when I hear that parable, particularly around the work that I'm doing across theology and black literature and politics and gender and sexuality and many of these intersecting topics, I want to feed the one that's going to create the greatest community. I don't want to feed the wolf that's going to destroy everybody. I want to feed the wolf that's going to create a community of care. So that's kind of where my mind goes. Awesome. That's a lovely answer. So I want to feed the wolf that's going to create a community of care. So that's kind of where my mind goes. Awesome. That's a lovely answer.

So I want to start off. There's a question that you pose early in the book that I think sits at the heart of the work you're doing, but I think a different version of it sits in the heart of the work all of us do in any way in our life, right? And you say that, I wonder to myself, how do I be black and Christian and American, right? And, you know, trying to be all three of those things and them calling different things out of you. And I think we could add male to that, right? Male is a whole element. You know, we might have listeners who are like, well, what's it like to be black and atheist and female? And we each have these different identities, I think, that may sort of call to us in different ways. And I'm just curious

how you think about being a whole person that balances all those different identities, particularly if they're calling for different things from you. Yeah, yeah. Incredible question. My mind immediately goes to Tonike Bambara's The Salt Eaters, which was a fantastic, fantastic novel, which is a story of a woman who is very much engaged in the struggle for liberation. But she finds herself in a psychiatric ward at the beginning of the book. And she's in this community of healers who have this ability to heal people. And at the beginning of the book, there is the question that is asked again and again and again are you sure you want to be well because healing and wholeness ain't no trifling matter and one of

the things that i love about this book and i have been just sitting with this book and sitting really with tony k bombar for a long time now is that you, there's a difference between doing creative and compelling work and actually being a good and healthy human being. You know, some people are really good at what they do and they may do it very well, but oftentimes in the process, they destroy themselves and others in the process because they don't know how to integrate various aspects of what it means to be a whole and healthy human being in what they're doing. And for me, I've made that mistake in the past and I have to continually be aware of my own limitations as it relates to my work right now. I think about my family. I think about being in ministry. I think about being a writer and a student and then somebody who's trying to do work in public. So many of these roles are

calling me in various different directions that is very easy to burn out. It's very easy to allow insecurity to win out. It's very easy to work from a place of imbalance. It's very easy to be resentful and even regretful in ways that I failed, in ways that I missed and fumbled the bag in the past. And I have to constantly remind myself of why I do this work that I do. I do it, as Baldwin said in his Fire Next Time, I do it because I love us. I love myself. I want all of us to be whole and healthy. And back to your initial question of that, what sits at the heart of my book is that question. What does it mean to be black, American and Christian? And it is really a nod to Audre Lorde, the black lesbian feminist poet, a mother who she self-described herself as.

She writes in Zami, a new spelling to my name, around page 170, 176, something like that. She says, I remember what it was like to be young and black and gay and lonely. And she goes and separates those various experiences, not with a comma, but with the word and. And it's as if she's suggesting that one needs to take into account what these various particularities in my identity mean and the ways in which they intersect in the most beautiful and terrible ways possible.

Then she goes on and says that we had to create various models. We had to create communities of love and accountability and responsibility and wholeness because we had no models. We had people who rejected us in those various experiences. We had people who let us down and failed us. And we have to find a way to show up in the world as our full and whole self instead of simply being reminded of what other people did to us. And so me, when I think about wholeness and healing and shouting in the fire in American Epistle, it is that journey continually, not trying to be the hero, but trying to find ways to be whole and healthy as a human person.

That's a beautiful answer. There's so many things you said in there I could touch on. It reminded me of a line in your book a little bit where you say, as a writer, I came to the realization that far more important than people liking my work or even resonating with my work or even using my work to shake things up was me liking myself and liking the complexity of life and believing that I had something worth giving that was saturated in maturity and love. And I love that last idea because any of those identities we want, any of those identities we take or that we inherit or

whatever, if we bring to them that idea of maturity and love, then that feels to me like a lot of the battle. Oh, yeah, 100%. 100%. And I think inside of our work that we do of trying to offer, you say in your platform, practical wisdom for a better life, or in my space, we're trying to create a world of love and liberation, where in some sense, my kind of springboard is at the intersection of Jesus and James Baldwin, black literature and theology. It's very easy to allow that work or that platform or whatever that is to mask who we really are. You know, it's easy to allow those things to allow us to run from ourselves. As I note in the book that whether I was in the orange Jersey or whether I was

reading theology or whether I was preaching, teaching, leading in these spaces, these spaces allow me opportunity to run from myself or run from other people or run from what I became, or in some sense made me the hero in the process. And I think at the heart of so much of the running is insecurity and fear that says that if people know me for who I really am, if people hear the whole story of what I actually

have become, then they will not accept me in my full self and they will reject me for who I want to become. And so much of our work, so much of this kind of growing up that we need to do must be saturated in maturity to realize that oftentimes we compare ourselves with the worst in ourselves and the best in other people. And when we do that, we will always look down on our journey. We will always diminish how much we've changed. And we will try and prove to people that what they are projecting on us or what they remember about us in the past is actually who we really were. When in actuality, that is just one part of the journey and it made us who we are today. And the fullness of that story is everything that came before and everything that happened in between. Yeah, that's awesome.

Very well said. I think it's time that we pivot a little bit to your story because I think it's an important part of the book. And I particularly want to focus in on kind of where you start the book primarily is really around the fact, and I'm going to set it up a little bit for listeners, and you correct me if I get anything wrong. You grew up in the rural South, Pentecostal, and then you went off to Clemson University to be a football player. And while that was happening, you began to get involved with, for lack of a better word, the white church. I'll let you kind of pick it up from there, kind of share a little bit about what was pulling you in that direction. And then we can sort of talk about your movement away from that. And then I think that leads into a lot of other areas we can go here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at this moment, this was in 2016, I was a rising leader in this predominantly white church. And by that time in 2016, I had already graduated from Clemson. I was very much invested in white evangelicalism through college, where we come on to campus as young black athletes and the ones who have greatest access to us. When you're thinking about like wisdom and spirituality and maturity and vocation, those who are shaping those ideas and those ideals are those who are white. When you think about preaching and things we should be involved in, it wasn't during that moment thinking about the injustice that was around us. Of course, those as my teammates were concerned about those injustices, particularly when I tell the story about Trayvon Martin

and my teammates standing in solidarity with him. But me lying saying I had work to do. So there were definitely moments and movements that I wanted to take seriously, the suffering that black people were enduring and trying to liberate us from the kind of enduring structures of white supremacy that were so pervasive in every aspect of our society. that were so pervasive in every aspect of our society. But in a very real way, that wasn't an overwhelming thing. It was more so like you're here to play football and you're here to get an education and everything else. You know, you need to, it's like that idea of the blinders. You need to leave all the noise.

When in actuality, we never took into account what we were missing when we had such a zoom in zero sum focus. And for me, so much of what I was missing was the wisdom and the love and the art and the culture that came from my black Pentecostal upbringing. And so much of it was me seeing whiteness as something to be desired and bringing me protection and bringing me resources and bringing me things that my parents and people around where I came from said was going to make me successful. Now, over time, I started to believe it and I started to get invested and get involved. And it changed how I name saw and showed up in the world. You know, studies suggest that the longer people of color and black people are within these white dominant spaces, the more we individualize our racial identity and the less we identify with our people that we come from. And so what tends to happen is the longer we're in those spaces, the more we're socialized out of where we in which I had devalued where

I come from and distance myself from the people that I came from. And then Donald Trump happened and I'm preaching, teaching, leading. And so many of these white members in this church were not just apathetic to our identities and our experiences, but they actually was actively hostile. And so that just wasn't for the members. That was also for the leaders. And so then in that moment, I had a decision I had to make. Either I stay and assimilate and be silent and it eats me up on the inside and I fail myself and my wife and my friends in very legitimate ways, or I make the more courageous decision to actually change and do something about the reality that I knew was harming all of us. There's so many things you write in the book about this that I

think are so powerful. And I think what you're describing, we're framing it in the context of black and white, and that's an important part of your story and all that. And I think as a human experience, there is a, you grow up, you kind of move away from what you were raised, you want to learn something new, you're looking for something else, you lose touch, you know, and there's this reckoning that goes on inside of us, right, between like, how I was raised and who I am now and what I believe now. And I think that's, that's so interesting. Of course, yours was amplified by the fact that you sort of suddenly realized like, oh, I'm in a space that's hostile towards my people, you know, and I'm curious to the extent that you sort of knew where you were and you really wanted to be there and you were willing to overlook a lot of things or to the extent that you were surprised and you went, holy mackerel, like some of this ugliness is coming out of the cupboard. And it's probably a little bit of both, but say a little more about that. I definitely think that it's very perceptive. Actually, so much of my story is that tension

of I'm not making myself the hero. I actually wanted to be there. And I write in a book that I had become a weapon. And it was a weapon that was always used against us, the black us, or any marginalized community, whether you're talking about black women, you're talking about LGBTQ. This idea of being white, conservative, evangelical male as like fundamentally Christian, that this this idea of listening to that voice as the dominant voice for how I thought about the world harmed so many people and I desired it because it brought me so much of what I was longing for and that was affirmation me and my friend was talking to some time ago one of my teammates and he was like yo bruh like we all live for this one thing when we playing ball and it's to hear from the coach great job job. I see you. You're doing great.

We're living literally day in and day out for that final affirmation at the end of every day, at the end of each game, at the end of each week, at the end of each year. Great job. Yo, you're doing amazing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. amazing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, when you speak to amplification, I think when we start taking into account social identities and affirmation, especially within a context of given injustice around experiences of race, class, gender, sexuality, place, ability, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, this kind of affirmation and assimilation is amplified. And we long for these things because, you know, these people in some sense have the ability to determine whether I stay here and go beyond or whether I go back home. And one of the things we didn't want from where I grew up is to go back home because it was almost like a metaphorical death sentence

to go back home. And so like so many young people that I was around, we live for the affirmation. And so inside of this white evangelical space, that affirmation came and it came again and again and again. And I want people to understand, I don't want people to be unaware that yo, to be young and black and male and straight and charismatic is to be marketable in these white spaces, especially

if you don't say anything about, you know, oppression, injustice, gender, sexuality, even how we think about the world and culture and cultural production. You know, we're very marketable and it's not until we start to push back against these dominant stories that we realize that these spaces only won us insofar as we make them feel good about who they are or what they're doing. Case in point, Colin Kaepernick. Case in point, many of the black women who stand up against this injustice in the NBA. in the NBA. I'm thinking about Maya Moore. Case in point, we see black gay men, black gay women standing up against the dominant forms in which even we black men uphold patriarchy. And so when you start thinking about this silencing and this assimilation and things like that, and just the ways in which it's amplified, especially for me in this space, I started to see that I was actually fooled to desire this space.

I was shaped to desire this space. It didn't naturally happen. This space called me to that desire, called me to that assimilation. And it wasn't until black women, particularly my wife and others started to force me to see how that desire for affirmation was destroying us and them in the process. It wasn't until then that I started to see the person that I had become. And that person was somebody who was really, as I said in the book, was anti-black. And I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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What you say about wanting that affirmation from coaches, from all of these people, I'm a straight white male. You know, as far as we talk about these imbalanced power dynamics, right? I sit up near the top, right? And that desire for affirmation still in the past has ruled parts of my life.

I can only imagine the pull of the forces when you add everything else into the dynamic that I simply don't have to cope with. Yeah, that's real. I think you think about race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, geography, immigration status, any of these kind of're always conscious of people seeing you and you being conscious of that being seen and so this is like one of my one of my brothers uh darnell moore he has this podcast being seen which is sitting at the intersections of black male gay life and queer life and trans life and

one of the things he talks about and we've so well in this podcast is these various experiences of hyper visibility and when you're talking about hyper visibility and being seen you're oftentimes judged differently than those who believe themselves to be the norm and i think when we talk about these marginalizations and being seen you're always mindful of how you show up in the world. You can't be enraged like other people can be enraged. You can't be sorrowful in ways that other people can be sorrowful. But there's also a hyper invisibility as well. So it's the tension. It's the paradox where you're conscious of being seen and other people see you,

but they don't take your experience seriously enough to actually change the conditions that you have to live in. So I'm thinking about the experience of college athletes right now, trying to fight for rights and trying to, you know, trying to create better conditions or even Brian Flores, the coach from the Miami Dolphins who calls the NFL working like it's on a plantation. We're not only hyper visible, but we're invisible in this space. It's like, yo, you should be grateful for being here when in actuality, we're not just grateful to exist. We actually want to have an experience of being free. And you can only be free when your humanity and your reality and your experiences are not only seen and felt, but actually taken into account

inside of an environment where you feel seen, inspired, and protected. And so, so much of that invisibility and visibility in these white institutions that my story is woven into is me trying to figure out a way how to give voice to so much of the pain, so much of the struggle, so much of the rage, so much of the violence that I was experiencing, even though it may not have been physical, it was psychological and emotional violence. It was trauma and being reminded of this trauma. And so much of my book and so much of these experiences are about giving voice to what we experience and what we know to be true and what we feel in our embodied social selves. Whether you're talking about being inside of a

classroom, whether you're talking about being inside of a social space, whether you're talking about being inside of a civic organization. As theologian Katie Cannon would say, there is no value-free space. We bring whoever we are and we need to take that seriously and we need to find ways of being together where we are all seen and inspired and protected in ways that make us more human and not less and takes into account that we don't all come here the same way that black women see different than i see that me as a young black male see different than white people see, that black trans women and men see different than we as those who assist HETC. And we need to take into account that their experience is as important as mine. And I need to take that into consideration and take that seriously in how I show up in the world.

You just said something there about there being no value-free spaces. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that was another question I wanted to sort of get at. So you were in the white evangelical church, right? Which we know that white evangelicals are the large majority of people who elected Donald Trump, right? So it's easy for me as a white person to go, well, dude, you were hanging with the wrong white folks, right? So seriously though, my question is, are there spaces that would have been less hostile or felt less violent to you as a black man? Or is it the fact that they were mostly white spaces by their very nature are that way? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's by the very nature of being white space.

Yeah. Whether you're talking about a conservative space or progressive space, oftentimes, you know, white people take for granted that they actually are white. Oh, yeah. We don't think about it. Yeah, 100%. And so one of the things James Baldwin talked about when he made the statement about, you know, working with the American communists is that the American

communists forgot that they were actually American. And so many of these value systems of Americanness, of dominance, of control, of politics, of fear, and et cetera, et cetera, was even at work in a self-proclaimed radical organization. And so I think it's by its very nature of being inside of that white space that was hostile to my reality. And I think we have to take into account the social construction of whiteness, that it is a value system that we have inherited from colonialism that makes whiteness the dominating force in how we name, see, and act within the world. And that dominating force sees itself as the norm. And whenever you're inside of a space that sees itself as the norm, it is only going to take into reality your way of seeing the world. It is only going to take that

into account very limited ways. And so I think by very nature of me existing in those spaces was really the culprit of my experience and the kind of struggles that I face. And I want to be clear, this runs rampant as well in black church spaces. So I talk to people all the time about the black church and things like that. I say, you know, if we say, you know, the black church is always a space of liberation, we can say that and say, yeah, that's kind of true. is always a space of liberation. We can say that and say, yeah, that's kind of true. But then also I tell people, you have to take into account, if I'm a black man in that space, then that may be true of me more than if I'm a black woman in that space, or if I'm black LGBTQ in that space. Oftentimes that space is not a space of liberation, but oftentimes a space that uses patriarchy and call patriarchy God and really utilizes the Bible

as a weapon in the same ways white people utilize the Bible as a weapon against us. And so I think as you're talking about the human experience, we all are shot through with that kind of reality and we can easily become the worst of who we are. But there are spaces where that might be true more than others. So I want to live in that tension of not triumphalizing one space over the other, as if like this space is going to be the space that finally saves what we lost from other spaces. But I will say that, you know, that some spaces are actually better than others. And we need to find out how to shine light on those spaces and support those spaces so that those spaces are created again and again and again inside of our society in hopes that even in our differences, as Audre Lorde would say,

even in our differences, that so many silences can be broken that we can meet and greet one another in our particular experiences as human beings who care deeply about the world we live in and create together yeah i think this is such a thorny problem because how do we find or create spaces that feel equal yeah you know yeah let's just say there's a predominantly white space that really says look i really want to become a space that's welcoming and open to all. And so in the beginning, I have a few black people who come, right? In the beginning, it's not their space. It doesn't feel right.

Like you said, it's still not right. But it takes time for people to sort of, you know, first there's a few, then there's more and more. Or we could reverse this and say it's a black space and a couple of white people come into it. How communities evolve in general is something I'm really interested in, let alone, I know how hard it is to create and evolve any community, let alone one that solves some of these equality problems in a fundamental way. Yeah. And I think this is the ongoing challenge, you know, why, why the work and the art is so important is because, you know, we have inherited problems that have had centuries to develop. I'm reminded of talking to one of our students, Octavia Butler, the writer, and the student came to her and asked about the parable of the source.

And the student said, you know, is it as bad as you make it seem in the parables? And she said, you know, I didn't create the problems. All I let them do was get about 30 years and let the dangers of the past become the disasters in the future. And so the student noticeably shook as he would be, asked, okay, where are we doomed? And Octavia Butler says, says no we're not doomed we're here right now in this moment and the student says well what is the

answer and octavia butler says there is no single answer there are thousands of answers you know and you can become one if you so choose to be and And when Octavia Butler wrote that in Essence magazine, it was entitled A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. She says we need to learn from the past. We need to respect the law of consequences and we need to count on surprises. So as I think about that and I think about my work and I think about the work of trying to find healing and wholeness in Black stories, Black life, black art and creativity. I want to try and figure out how to continually find and search for those answers and continually in small ways become that answer. Because I know that there is even my book and so many of these books that I'm surrounded by or so many of these great thinkers that I lean on.

There is no one single answer, but there are many answers that we can find in their literature. When I'm thinking about James Baldwin or Tony K. Bambara or Alice Walker or Richard Wright or somebody in the religious world like James Cone or Katie Kenner, M. Sean Copeland, that there are so many answers in these various spiritual teachers and leaders and so many answers in the everyday ordinary ways that we black people take whatever we have and we turn it black and i want to find those answers i want to find those things that would allow me to embody the best of what we can become and hopefully over time like a sculpture an artist that that time, every single hit would turn that sculpture into something beautiful. So that when people years and years and years from now will look back on this sculpture,

they will not only hear about the journey that got us here, but they will also be able to see the product that we have actually created. And that's what I think is the answer. It's doing whatever we can in our art to give voice to these stories, to give voice to these experiences, but also to say that we are not just simply what other people make us, but that we are human and worthy of the deepest love and the best any of us have to offer in any given moment. Beautifully said. I was listening to something this morning and they were talking about an idea that's not terribly unusual, but seems to be coming up for me recently, which is that reading fiction makes you a more empathetic human being because you have to see the world through someone else's eyes or done well. part of an answer is for white people to be reading black authors, to be getting an understanding of what that actually looks like. And I specifically mean, in some cases, fiction, given its potential

for creating empathy. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, that's a hard one, you know, because we have been writing literature, whether you talk about poetry, you know, fiction, essays, sermons, songs, we've been doing art for centuries. And even as we have done art for centuries, there have been white people who have learned and who have changed. But the vast majority of white people have stayed the same and wanted to maintain the white supremacist power superstructure inside of our societies. And, you know, even when we're thinking about the abolitionist movement of the time of enslavement, that even the abolitionist movement, they thought about charity rather than justice. They were okay with, you know, fighting for the cause of seeing black people free from the bondages of slavery but they did not want to see themselves free uh from the bondage of

white supremacy so white people were always reading our literature and always taking whatever we created in this world sometimes exploiting it uh even now where you're thinking about like black creatives and black tiktok how so much of like millennials and gen z we are creating so much and still white young people are still benefiting from our creativity and exploiting it you know so this has always been like a constant story but i do think that literature does hold promise for change i do believe that people can change and do change. But for me, I don't think that that is the framework that is most important in my own life and in my own work. I recently wrote

a essay with CNN on Black History Month, where the essay was entitled, We Redefine Blackness as a World and a Gift. And in this essay, one of the things that really stood out to me in my process of writing this essay is I was thinking about Black History Month and thinking about 2020, where so many of our black books became bestsellers. And those books deserve to be bestsellers because some of them are great art and many of them are great art. But oftentimes I realized that so much of the conversation about black life and art and history is oftentimes flattened because people fail to look at life through our own eyes. Like they fail to see the ways that we move and dance and create life.

And they fail. They fail to see the ways in which like that we are people, that we are human beyond their gaze. And I want to argue that, you know, black history and black art and creativity is not about saving America or saving white people, that it is about us, that it is not just simply asking the question, you know, how can I remember or learn from black people? But it's all of us asking, how can we love black people by seeing us and hearing us and creating a world where we feel seen, inspired and protected? and creating a world where we feel seen, inspired, and protected. That is very much farther than simply seeing us as you're reading us, talking to us, being around us to teach you, because that simply centers you and what you can learn and how you progress. What I want to do, as Toni Morrison done and so many Black writers have done, is take away that kind of gaze and say, you know, it is about us. It is about the world that we are living in. It is not totally about us because, you know, Baldwin would always say, you know,

that in the devil finds work, that no person can live without the others or Martin Luther King talking about interdependence, that no person can be free without the freedom of another person. But there is something to be said about the ways in which people reduce us to simply what we can educate them in and and make them feel better or less racist and how that actually harms us and fails us to see us as fully human in and of ourselves. teach white people or save white people i don't know in that sense because history doesn't give us uh any you know legitimate evidence to believe that fully and finally like reading us being around us will save people but i do believe that literature our lives do hold the promise uh for all people and mostly for us to say that we don't have to prove who we are, but that we are actually full of love, full of truth, full of grace, full of failure, full of imagination, full of beauty. That's worth studying and documenting and talking about rather than

simply reducing us. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

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and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the end there, you referred to the white gaze, right? You referred to your work not being about educating white people, which I couldn't agree with more.

You said wanting to be seen as fully human, And this is where I get challenged personally. I feel like I do see black people as fully human. And I also know that if I ignore the specifics of what it is to be black for them, I feel like I'm missing something. I'm asking this as a very genuine, earnest question about how to relate just human to human. But if we're not careful, that human to human relationship becomes about what I've learned is propagating white supremacy is to say, well, I just don't see color. So I feel like I'm trying to balance these two things. I'm like, well, okay, I want to just see human to human. You've got children. I've got children. You've got parents, you know, you've got a, you had a grandparent who passed a dementia. My partner's mom has Alzheimer's. Like we're living the same

thing there, human to human, you know? And then there are these factors of identity and wanting to respect those and understand those, but also not separate. And so that's not even a question so much as it's a, you know. Yeah, no, no, I got you. No, I got you. I got you. And I think we have to talk about, you know, the continuity and the discontinuity in our human experience. You're right. There are going to be aspects of our human experience that intersect, you know, in very real ways, but there are also going to be aspects that intersect in very different ways. So to think about suffering, we thinking about healthcare, let's take healthcare. And to example,

it's very clear that black women die at higher rates than white women. We may both struggle from hemorrhaging. We may both struggle from emergency induction. We may both struggle from the pains associated with the body of pregnancy. But when we go inside the hospitals, when we go inside these structures, those structures determine so much in that experience and how that experience is related to and the outcome of those experiences. And so I think we have to talk about that discontinuity as well, that that many of us may experience some of the quote unquote same things. But we're talking about a kind of

ecosystem that we're living in, a structure of life conditions. There's so much discontinuity, you know, in that if we're thinking about social pain and injustice that oftentimes, you know, white people experience pain just like we experience pain. But white people also live in a society that believes their pain matter more than other people's pain. you see we're living inside of a country that oftentimes is more concerned about poor white people in Appalachia than is concerned about a system that that has impoverished black communities else's pain and i think many ways for us to kind of think about that many of the ways that we can think better about that is in some sense you know creating ways to enter into struggles with the understanding that our struggles may be similar but but they're fundamental differences. And in some sense, I should relate to someone as normal, but that normality is always rooted in the particularities of your identity. When I relate to Black women inside of this society, and I think about the

ways in which I oftentimes upheld patriarchy, when I started to read bell hooks and Alice Walker and Tony Morris and Tony K Bambara, you know, I had to be both disciple out and socialize out of the ways in which I've thought of myself as a black man. You know, then I had to relate to black women and black LGBTQ as normal. Those experience of love, those experience of failure, those experience of dreaming and imagination and desire and intimacy is as normal as how I think about my own self. But it wasn't enough for me to read The Will to Change or Be Real Cool or In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and the likes or Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions or reading June Jordan and so much of her work. It was enough for me to read black feminists and womanist theology. But I had to fundamentally alter how I thought about myself as a black man to take into account that the way y'all see me needs to be taken seriously. And of course, I struggle with oppression the same way you struggle. But there is a discontinuity in our struggles where I may be empowered in one area that you are not.

And I need to show up and move, move in the world with that awareness and how I converse and how I relate. And even public conversation, whose pain, whose struggles are oftentimes mute and silence. And how can I bring those struggles along with me when I show up in public? So it wasn't enough to just simply read their book and try and change how I thought about myself. I needed to change how I move inside of the world and who I brought along with me. So if we're thinking about patriarchy and gender and sexuality and then bringing race and white supremacy and anti-blackness into that. You know, white people should be doing the same. Relate to us as if our reality and our art and our culture is as important and as normal as yours. And I'll never forget Toni Morrison talking to was being interviewed and the interviewer asked about, know like you know white white characters in her

literature and she makes the statement that the interviewer didn't understand just how profoundly racist that question was to ask tony morrison like you know when you're going to write about why there are more white people in your literature and when you're going to write about more white people and then tony morrison made the statement you can't even imagine that the way I live is actually the mainstream and you're outside of the mainstream. So it is changing how we think of ourselves and relate to ourselves as we relate to other people and thinking about these norms and values and ideas and reshaping them so that, you know, we find better ways of being together. Yeah, I am now again, need about 10 or 15 minutes to fully process everything that you said there. I love what you say about the places where we sort of intersect and then also diverge,

you know, and that being real. And I think that what you were talking about with relating to, say, black women brings up some of the dynamic, right? Which is how do I relate to a group that I see as having been marginalized in certain ways, and that I'm part of the marginalizing group, you know, in certain spaces? And what's the proper relation? You know, because you mentioned earlier about the abolitionists, you know, wanted charity, not justice. So these are a lot of really profound questions that we are running out of time to be able to answer. And as you said, they're incredibly complex. I want to spend a little bit of time, though, talking about your work and the relation it has to your life, the role that creation plays

for you, going all the way back to where we started talking about being whole humans, you know, what is the role that creation plays for you in being a whole human? If we think in religious terms of like creation as the creative world, or... I mean, you as an artist. Okay, cool, cool. Yeah. And I think it does have relation to like the creative world or i mean he was an artist okay cool cool yeah and i think it does have relation to like the creative world as well that so much of you know our work as artists as james baldwin would say is in some sense taking the intangible dreams that reside inside of us and around us and making them tangible inside of the world.

That he says, this is not the statesman that is our strongest arm in leading us away from the old world into the new, but it is the writer. And I think because as we pay attention to the created world, we realize that these circumstances have been created. And if they have been created, then they can be rethought and reimagined. And so, so much of my work as an artist is looking at the world that we have inherited, both on a social political level, but also looking at the black worlds that I've inherited and figure out how to lean and dance and explore these black worlds that I've inherited so that this world that we are living in,

that we have inherited a world marked by white supremacy, anti-blackness, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, all the isms marked by so many fault lines and so much power struggles and ideas of control that I work as artists is to try and find ways that we can uncover the beauty and the sacredness of our lives and uncover the tension and the complexity that we bring to life every single day and try and again and again and again to show up on the page, telling people to pause and look again at us and say that there is so much more for us to see. It's so much more for us to explore. There's so much more for us to lean into because when you think about healing and wholeness, if we just think about our own kind of emotional healing and wholeness, oftentimes finding healing and wholeness is about making sense of what has

happened in the past and how that lingers in the present in hopes that in the future we can show up better than what we were. And I think my job as an artist is to lean inside of the stories of so much of Black literature and Black religion and figure out ways to make sense of the past and figure out how we can be better in the present so that we embody something better in the future. What is that creative process like for you personally? In what ways do you feel that you being an artist lifts you up personally? I think for me, so much of that work is about finding ways to speak to what I'm feeling. You know, so much of my writing is out of things that I read and things that I'm wrestling with. You know, so much of this work is bound with so much

insecurity. In reality, like whatever we create has the opportunity to make us most insecure because oftentimes we're creating work out of competition and felt need to be relevant in a sense of, you know, the algorithm, the algorithm, you know, will destroy us because we got to always create, create, create what's been designed in this present moment and if we do that over and over we're eventually gonna get burned out yeah and i feel like that that dislike comparison is the thief of creativity and so much of my work is trying to create away from that move away from comparing myself to people and writing what I want to write like like I wrote this joint on Tony Morrison hopefully that goes live this week because I wanted to write

it the piece for CNN I wrote it because I wanted to write it yeah I'm working right now on an essay on sum of soul and black gospel because I want to write these things. So for me, so much of this work is doing the work that I want to do. You know, it's easy to try and be somebody else as a writer or be somebody else as a podcast or be somebody else as a creative, but so much of our life depends on us being who we are and trying to be the best that we can be in that. And for me, that makes me come most alive it's challenging it's hard because sometimes what you want is not what others want from you yeah and in moments you got to give people what they want you you do that as a writer there are

moments where you just got to give people what they want i was reminded of this even with that tony morrison article yeah i had to be reminded of that that yo like like my boy ro, he had to remind me, yo, give the people what they want when they ask for this article, you know, and sometimes it's going to be like that, that you got to give people what they want, but you also want to do what you want to do and what makes you feel most alive. And I think so much of creation and being artists is about interviewing people that make us come alive or writing about things that make us come alive. So yeah. I think that's a beautiful place for us to end, Dante. That's a beautiful sentiment to go out on. So thank you so much for coming on. Your book is called Shouting in the Fire, An American Epistle.

We'll have links in the show notes where people can get access to that. You are an exceptional, exceptional writer. It's a a powerful book. So thank you so much for spending some of your time with us. Thank you, Eric. And thank you to the listeners of The One You Feed. You make podcasting what it is. You make so much of this what it is. And I want to do this as I do at the end of every interview. I want to thank you, our listeners, for engaging, for supporting, for sharing. Keep doing that. Keep showing up for Eric and others. So thank you. Thanks, Dante.

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