Damon Wayans

I am perplexed by the question of how much outrageous talk we should endure in the name of entertainment.

When I began the blog, I asked friends to forward ideas or situations they thought I should address. My friend took me up on this, after watching Damon Wayans peddling his outrageous and insulting ideas on The View. I watched the clip on ABC.com and heard Wayans declare, in the name of not being hypocritical, that Don Imus was right in dubbing the Rutgers basketball team nappy-headed hos. When the hosts of The View objected, Wayans without originality implied that Black people would find his defense of Imus humorous, although white people would sit at home with a confused look on their faces.

It seems to me that the problem of blatantly offensive and misleading speech in the name of entertainment is inherent in the comedic genre. Of course, there have been comics who resist the urge simply to shock or go for cheap laughs, but usually the edginess that makes comedians funny skirts the boundaries of propriety, offense, and frequently meanness.

The Imus comment and the Wayans reprise are not simply matters of free speech or of (the lack of)taste. We who listen judge them to decide when attempts to be funny are just too mean or too false or too stupid to laugh at. And even when we laugh, out of nervousness or amusement, we have the right to consider whether our own laughter represents some baser emotion that we prefer not to indulge. And, yes, we even have the right to be so weary of seeing and hearing ourselves demeaned that we protest and refuse to take it anymore.

Fugitive Safe Surrender 2

According to the United States Marshal's office, the most recent Fugitive Safe Surrender, held at Bible Way Church in Washington, D.C., was a success as more than 500 persons turned themselves in, including 240 on the last day of the operation.

Conceived of by Peter J. Elliott, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio,after the death of Cleveland Police Officer Wayne Leon at the hands of a wanted fugitive, Fugitive Safe Surrender is a powerful new initiative that encourages persons wanted for felony or misdemeanor crimes to voluntarily surrender to the law in a faith-based location. The program now has been adopted as a national USMS-sponsored initiative.

The Marshal's report continues:

Preliminary results showed that 530 individuals surrendered over the program’s three days, and that 53 of those were wanted for felony crimes. However, fewer than three percent of all those who participated in the program were arrested. For those few, charges included domestic violence, escape from jail, and felony assault. Sixty-four of the people who appeared at the church found that they had no active warrants against them, further illustrating the benefit of the program.

Last week the City of Philadelphia was on edge as a fugitive, now identified as John Lewis was at large, following the fatal shooting of police officer Chuck Cassidy. Lewis was apprehended in a homeless shelter in Miami after days of intense police activity in the the Oak Lane section of Philadelphia and because of tips encouraged by the $150K reward.

In addition to my concern about an armed, frightened killer at large, before Lewis was caught, I sympathized with his family and friends who worried that he would not live to face trial. While most of those who surrendered in D.C. were not wanted for felonies, that program gave me hope for more humane and frankly less dangerous means of bringing even those wanted for felonies to justice.

There is so little good news when it comes to law enforcement, especially as it relates to African Americans. Let's hear it again for the US Marshal's office and enlightened experiment in fugitive surrender.

A Revival for Our Time

I spent the last two days in Atlanta where I was privileged to be a part of a revival at Ebenezer Baptist Church. This revival had all of the usual elements: singing (Helen Baylor, Dottie Peoples, and choirs), preaching (yours truly), prayer and praise (at least half of those assembled). But this revival had more: voter registration, feeding the homeless, scholarly discussion (Dr. Obery Hendricks discussing The Politics of Jesus). It was themed "Victory in the Village" and had at its core a concern for the holistic needs of a community in crisis.

While I was in Atlanta, breaking news announced that six prominent "mega ministries" are under Senate investigation. Yet again, the images of ministerial opulence that include half-million dollar cars, multi-million dollar estates, jet planes, and prosperity preaching dominated the media coverage of Christian life. I was embarrassed, though no longer surprised, since we have come to take these distortions of the gospel for granted. And I might say especially in Atlanta.

But I am thankful that conspicuous consumption is not the only story. Ebenezer is not the only church bearing witness. God still has prophets who have not bowed the knee the god of this world. Jesus still has some followers. I hope that my efforts contributed to the transformation of a few more.

Fugitive Safe Surrender

Just when I had given up hope for any good news to emerge either from the District of Columbia or the Black church, I happened to be listening the NPR's All Things Considered and heard the story of Bible Way Church and its role in a program called Fugitive Safe Surrender.

Safe Surrender permits fugitives accused of nonviolent offenses to turn themselves in to federal marshals in the safety of the Bible Way Church facilities. It is a win-win situation which conserves law enforcement money and personnel as well as giving people who made a mistake in fleeing the opportunity to turn themselves in without making their legal predicament worse. Although it does not offer amnesty, it does portend leniency in sentencing, and some of those who have surrendered actually leave on the same day with a clean slate.

There is a lot of bad news in the church world today, thousands of reasons to suspect that many church leaders have completely lost touch with reality. I am delighted to see Bible Way continuing its historical commitment to holistic transformation and social justice. I hope some other people are listening and watching too.

Trick or Trauma

Because I have been reading Renita Weems's blog, I knew that today was a day for wearing red in solidarity with those who are drawing attention to the violence against women. For me, that means that it is also a day to stand against anyone who seems to condone such violence simply because the victim of the violence does not fit the mold of propriety or morality or whatever else.

Here in Philadelphia, a (female) judge last week reduced a rape charge to armed robbery and "theft of services" when a woman who had agreed to have protected sex with two men for a fee was forced to have unprotected sex with four men at gunpoint. Judge Teresa Carr Deni's problem with the case clearly relates to her disapproval of the original agreement, but it is frightening that a judge could miss the basic point when it comes to legal definitions of rape- namely, that when someone forces a sex act upon you, it is rape. The victim in the case was trying to turn a trick and got a trauma. The gunpoint part should have been a clue to Judge Deni.

This points to why we need days like today to draw attention to the wrong of violence. We need to remind the world and even judges that no on deserves the beating and that no one asks for being raped. We need to raise awareness so that the community and the courts do not traumatize abused women simply because we do not approve of them.

McClurkin's Testimony

I thought the story was going to blow over, but apparently not. It seems that gay rights advocates are disappointed with Barack Obama for not "disinviting" Donnie McClurkin who was a headliner at Obama's South Carolina gospel concert. The problem? Donnie McClurkin's testimony that God "delivered" him from homosexuality.

Now let me say at the outset that I am not writing this blog to take on the question of the authenticity of McClurkin's testimony. Rather, I want to weigh in and simply remind people that testimony is what it was. It represented McClurkin's right to frame and define his own identity. And McClurkin has generally been apolitical about this particular aspect of his testimony.

It's not that I am missing the point that gay rights advocates make, namely, that the kind of testimony McClurkin gives may be used to undermine their claims in framing and defining their identity. They reason that if people take McClurkin's word for being delivered, then those same people will refuse to accept the word of gay people who say that their sexual orientation is not a choice.

I said in a blog a few weeks ago that testimony is judged by the performance of the one giving the testimony and by other facts that are known to the hearer. Do you believe McClurkin? Do you believe his opponents? Either? Neither? At the moment, that's not even really the question. The question at hand has to do with whether you believe Obama.

However all of this turns out, putting Obama in the middle is not sensible. If he's going to win the Democratic nomination or the Presidency (and this goes for whoever wins), he is going to have to be attractive to people who are not attractive to each other. The "values" question cannot be "Do I agree with Obama about everything?" but "Can I support the candidate given the reasoning behind the positions with which I disagree?"

Wilson Freed

As most of you who have followed the story probably already know, Genarlow Wilson, the student-athlete who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after his conviction for having oral sex with a 15 year old when he was 17, has been freed. The protests and legal arguments have finally succeeded in undoing a gross miscarriage of justice that followed from the mandatory sentencing. But even though Wilson is freed, the problems that led to his tragic case remain, namely, under-aged drinking and random sexual activity.

When asked on Friday where his welcome home party was being held, Wilson wisely responded that he was staying away from parties for a while. This is because the initial scene of the crime for which he was convicted was a hotel party where alcohol and drugs were consumed by Wilson and his friends. We have to face the facts that across the nation, adults are providing alcohol to teenagers who are far too young and inexperienced to drink legally or responsibly. Studies show that alcohol consumption at early ages predisposes one to alcoholism in adulthood. And high school students across social, economic, racial, and regional lines are being injured physically and emotionally by drinking and by the irresponsible adults who are providing the drinks.

That brings me to the next point. After months of hearing about the Genarlow Wilson case, it was the website What about Our Daughters that brought the full story to my attention. The full story is not a case of a boy and his girlfriend having oral sex and the boy being arrested. The full story involves several boys, at least two girls, and an orgy of sexual activity caught on video. The sexually graphic video captured images of the guys taking turns having intercourse with a 17-year-old girl who was drunk. Although Wilson was acquitted of raping the 17-year-old, his buddies pleaded guilty to sexual battery in connection with their non-consensual contact with her. There is a lesson that we must teach our sons and daughters. We have to protect our children by warning them about the dangers of drug and alcohol impairment. We have to tell them that you can get so drunk that you wake up the next morning not knowing whether you had sex or with whom. And we have to tell our children that they are too valuable to be having sex with someone who doesn't know who they are or what they are doing. Moreover, we have a responsibility to teach them what "consent" means, legally and morally.

Black people especially cannot leave it to the courts or the criminal justice system to sort out our children. We are going to have to get off the dime and begin to have the hard, honest, even graphic conversations that may prevent the kind of hard fall that Genarlow Wilson, his friends, and the two young women all took.