“We are the only people that pray to a god that doesn’t look like us. As a matter of fact we pray to a god that looks like our oppressor…” That was a Facebook comment, an actual real one – name not needed here for obvious reasons.
It was with regard to a comment that was made about people posting memes like “If you believe ‘this’ or ‘that’ or ‘the other’ type ‘AMEN’ and hit ‘share’ or ‘LIKE’.”
Those types of memes usually come about in the form of a quote from ear-tickling church philosophers like Joel Osteen or TD Jakes. However, there were also comments about Black people’s beggarly insider mental illnesses when it comes to always falling on our knees in these churches and eternally bowing down to white supremacy rather than kicking it in the teeth while standing on our own feet.
We tend to do this, some believe, more in the church than on the streets and highways; and that would make “Black christians” enablers of white supremacy, even in its darkest and most god-forsaken moments.
To some, it appears that the only things the immutable ‘we’ are afraid of as Black people are white people and how angry God will be at us if we don’t do what white people want us to do when they want us to do it. Or how God will punish us profusely if we do not worship white skin above all of Creation.
Or how we will be punished ‘by God’ if we don’t “forgive” them all their various sins and transgressions, no matter what they do — as if the Savior’s sacrifices were not good enough and we have to add our own sacrifices to the pot in order to complete the manifest act of goodness in the world.
What’s really puzzling is … why would anyone would think that God, or a false representation of the god of the oppressor, is to blame for anything that goes down or goes wrong in the Black communities across America.
God or no one god or oppressor, one thing is for certain above all else — we, as a people, worship whatever gods that we want to worship whatever way we want to worship them; and we often back it up with the money we have. Our lips say one thing, but our spending habits say another.
It is Monday evening after the fourth of July, and folks are still outdoors popping off firecrackers as if their six-day July 4 homage of worship to slaveholders, “nigger-makers,” and Indian killers did not last long enough.
For Black America, it doesn’t take a church building or a preacher or pastor in order to worship or idolize a god or an “oppressor who doesn’t look like us.”
We also worship “gods that look like our oppressors” at the banks, the ATMs, the car dealerships, the stores, the malls, the shoe stores, and the hair shops as well as every time we turn on a television and watch an oppressive reality show like Empire or Haves/HaveNots, or Scandal; or even when we listen to oppressive rap music or tune our Internet dials on to oppressive social media videos on places like WorldStarHipHop and all of the others.
Church isn’t the only place where Black America “worships” the oppressor and his various gods.
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