Episode 39: EJ Gaines: Messy Community? It's Called 'Unity'
Transcript
Patsy: Hi, I’m Patsy Clairmont, and I’m a Boomer.
Andrew: And I’m Andrew Greer, and I’m a Millennial.
Patsy: And you are listening to Bridges.
Andrew: Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations
Patsy: Season Two is brought to you by Food for the Hungry.
Andrew: Meeting the physical and spiritual needs of people all around the world for over 50 years.
Patsy: I think it’s incredible that we’ve had the privilege to have so many excellent guests this month that have brought to us truth, and certainly, one of those is our guest today EJ Gaines.
Andrew: Yes. EJ Gaines comes with really a wealth of knowledge and experience in the realm specifically of facilitating conversations about racial unity, racial reconciliation. He really has a conciliatory… He really has…
Patsy: A way about him.
Andrew: I agree.
Patsy: Let’s get to the bottomline of this. The man has a great deal of heart, and he shares it with intelligence and tenderness.
Andrew: So get ready to lean in and listen well.
Patsy: You know we cannot begin without a bridge. Always gotta be a bridge, and this bridge, I’m gonna take you to Paris. How do you like that for a destination?
Andrew: I love it.
Patsy: And when you get there, I’m going to take you to the Louvre, but you’re on one side of the river, the Louvre is on the other. How’re you gonna get there? So they built a bridge, not just any kind of bridge but the standard for bridges for the next hundred years. And they had learned enough to know that if you want walkers on the bridge, that there’s a safety factor of putting a little step up. And so they built the first sidewalks in Paris on that bridge, and it invited the pedestrians to linger, to look at the view, because the bridge was gorgeous and the Louvre was gorgeous, so there was a lot to look at and all the fountains around. So it was a meeting place where strangers could become friends, and that’s why I selected that because we have a friend who’s come to us today to talk to us about a difficult topic that some people are strangers to. And we’re going to have a conversation that’s gonna help us all, and EJ is gonna take us there.
Andrew: Andrew’s gonna take us to EJ. We have EJ Gaines in the house. Some of you may know EJ, if you do follow him on socials, and if not, we would recommend that you do because, just like that sidewalk was giving a step up for pedestrians to get from one side of the river to the other, EJ, just by following you on socials, the conversations you’re willing to have around race relations with people of all different races, colors, backgrounds, et cetera, is giving us all a step up, I think, a leg up in helping cross that bridge.
Of course, your day job, if you will, is SVP marketing in Capitol Christian Music Group. Of course, that also includes Motown Gospel. You’ve worked on some incredible records just of late, like some that I think that are some of my favorites like Harry Connick Jr.’s Alone With My Faith and Tori Kelly’s Hiding Place, incredible records.
You get to be a part of artists’ life and creative life. Your background as an entertainment lawyer means also that you know what you’re talking about or you know how to…
EJ: I know how to fake it.
Andrew: That’s what I was trying to get to. You got there for me. But you are not faking it in these conversations that we’ve been having.
First question I have, and then we have questions from listeners that they’ve submitted that if they were sitting in this room, ones they would love to have, but my first question is how did you even get into being a sort of definitive voice or just a willing and generous kind of landmark of a voice in the race conversation?
EJ: Oh, it was an accident. It was a huge accident. I never would’ve endeavored to do something like that. I think that is… Well, first of all, I have a day job and I have other things to do, and that was not my plan. Really want happened was, at the top of 2020, I felt completely far from God, very, very far. And not in the sense that my community wasn’t around, I had my circle, but I remember saying to my wife, “I don’t know if I’m a Christian.” And she said, “Well, what are you talking about? Of course you are.” I’m like, “But in terms of actually living a life that is yielded and one that just experiences the fullness of God on a daily basis. I’m not talking about acts. I’m just talking about how I feel, how I view myself.” And so I said, “God, I just want to be closer to you. I just want to feel that. I want to feel that on a daily basis.”
I did a Bible-in-a-year plan, and every time that I would sit in the morning to do it, I would start journaling. And God, it was as if he was just waiting to whoop me. As soon as I said, “Okay, God, what do you want to say?” it was like, I’m glad you asked. There’s pride here. There’s unforgiveness here. I mean, he just really started showing me the areas that needed to be addressed.
And so I just started journaling, and then, every now and then, those journal entries, I thought, I’ll just post that online, and then maybe it’ll resonate with someone, it’ll help someone. And so I did that, and people started liking it or whatever, sharing it, engaging, but it wasn’t until the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, and I was trying to process it because, of course, this is still just my journaling. This is my time in the morning with God, trying to make sense of yesterday or plan ahead for today. And I said, “God, I don’t know what to do with this.” And so he just started showing me what I was hurt about, what I was frustrated about, what I was angry about, and really challenged me to deal honestly with that. You know, you can’t run from God, so you’re just dealing with your raw emotions. And then he would say, Now post that. And I was like, No, no, no, no. That’s for you and me. And so I just tried it though, and it resonated so deeply that I thought, If this is helping somebody to make sense of one of the most nonsensical, uncertain times that we’ve lived in, between the pandemic, the political space, the racial unrest, I’ll just keep posting and see what happens, and maybe it’ll help people.
And so now two years later almost, it has helped a lot of people. But I’m still doing the same thing. These are just my journal entries. I see things, I feel things, I’m a Black guy from Chicago, so my perspective is just what I bring to social media. I got no dog in the hunt. I generally think that a lot of us are wrong more often than we are right. I think that we learn by listening to one another, and I’m just a voice. And then there’s like 8 billion others to listen to.
Andrew: Zandy Mowry, we had her from The New Respects on last episode, and she expressed from her perspective that sharing our individual stories and that her perspective as a Black woman, her story is different than another Black woman’s, and mine as a white man is different than another white man’s. We can’t generalize necessarily, though there are I think some general questions that can be important to, at least, instigating the conversation within our own mind and hearts.
Because this came out of your time of reflection with God in the mornings, at night, whenever you do that, I really wasn’t gonna ask this question, but one question that was posed is what is a biblical perspective on the topic of race relations.
EJ: Oh, I wish my masters-of-divinity-having wife were next to me at this point because she articulates this much better than I do. But I think that what she has said, and what I’ve come to learn, is that unity and diversity is the picture of the Kingdom of God. It just is. All throughout Scripture, we see diverse people — diverse backgrounds, diverse walks of life, socioeconomic status, diverse perspectives — and God calls us to a messy community, and he calls it unity. And then it’s not just on earth that it’s gonna be that way; he then promises in the book of Revelation this is what it’s always gonna be. You’re always gonna be every nation, every tribe, every tongue. It’s going to be that worshiping around the throne of God.
And so I think the biblical perspective nudges everyone to just get over it and to figure this out because this is what eternity’s going to be. Now the messy part of that, the part that makes it difficult on earth, is that we all are carrying our baggage and our wounds and our hurts and our brokenness, but that’s what sanctification is for and that's what yielding to Christ is all about.
So we yield to Christ, and this is just prep work because we’re going to be together — Black, white, Asian, Latino. We’re all going to be together worshiping around the throne of God, and it's going to be beautiful, and it’s going to be perfect, and it’s going to bring him glory. And so there’s no sense in not liking that or not pursuing that now when we know that that’s the picture of eternity that we’ve been given.
“God calls us to a messy community, and he calls it unity.”
Patsy: That’s a gorgeous picture and reminder to us that it’s the plan, and the limitation seems to be within our own hearts and our perspective that has been corrupted on some levels and has had even fear put into the mix of our thinking, and so there’s a lot of work and a lot of healing that needs to happen.
Andrew: There is. There’s something you said though, that if you were to take it out of context, could be interesting, where you said because it is the plan, because it is the design for us to live together in community in unity. I understood what you were saying when you said, “So we just need to get over it,” basically to get to the other side and start having the conversations. But a couple of the questions resonated in a similar fashion. They were saying what do we say to our white brothers and sisters, and these were white people asking the question, who say why can’t we just get over the hurt, the race relations? Why is this still a dividing thing when, and a piggyback question to some of that would be, I am not personally enslaving someone. I don’t know who did that, and they’re not slaves now. It’s that us and them thing. But what’s your response to that, when people say, “Why can’t we just get over the race relations?”
EJ: Trust me, I think most Black people in America would say that no one wants to stop talking about it more than Black people in America because it is exhausting. And I get it. I’m blessed to have a rich community of friends from various ethnicities, various walks of life, and the grace that I have in having this conversation is that almost every time I’m having a conversation like this, I see someone that I adore in my mind and I think, I would never want to say something that would hurt this person, this white person, this older person, this younger person. I would never want to say anything disparaging or in a generalized way that would make them feel that. And so there’s a certain degree of benefit of the doubt and a certain degree of empathy and tenderness to having this conversation because you don’t want to say anything flippantly.
And I think that that question is a very common one in America right now where a lot of people are saying, “Listen, the weight of what this could mean, if I take it to be completely true and take it to its logical end, the weight of that is so heavy that it would annihilate me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t feel this way about people. The people in my life don’t feel this way about people. Why is this such an issue?” And I get that.
A family member, we were at her house for a holiday meal a couple years ago, and she had a Post-it note on the fridge and it had dates, and it was talking about slavery and the hundreds of years that that went, and then Jim Crow and the decades that that went. And then you realize there was only, on paper, the right to vote and all these things, all these restrictions on Black people in America, there was only what we would say on paper is freedom for about 50 years. And when you think of that, I thought, Well, she’s 55.
So it’s hard to get over it because the people who are the direct recipients of so much hatred and so much pain and so much restriction and so much injustice are still here. And when you think about the reality of that, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine who’s a younger white guy, and it was a hard conversation, and I said, “Hey, tell me about your great-great-grandfather.” And so he just started talking about how great he was and the years that he was alive. And I said, “Now do you think that he embraced Black people or that he fought for civil rights or not so much?” Got quiet about it, and he said, “He probably got quiet about it.” And I said, “So would you say that he was an incredible man or that he had a couple flaws?” And that was the moment where he had to acknowledge, I wish that he hadn’t gotten quiet. And I said, “Listen, that’s real.” That’s a real feeling, and the more we can embrace the reality that our history, and in some ways, our present, is not beautiful to everyone, that everyone in our lives, they’re just a pool of imperfect people that we’re gonna be, and that some people missed it, but we can still respect them and love them, but this was wrong.
The more we can do that, the more we can embrace conversation that really heals people. And so when people want to get past it, I think I can still see the effects of those wounds. I can still see the effects of the injustice, and until those effects are negligible or not noticeable or immaterial, I think we have to at least acknowledge it. Now, that does not mean that someone has to walk around bearing the shame of something that their ancestors did.
Andrew: Okay, okay.
EJ: That’s a big thing. I say this a lot. Without disparaging to African Americans and allies of the Black community, there’s a difference between progress and demanding a pound of flesh, and sometimes the pound of flesh, without any statement for a resolution, without any statement as to how one can be made whole, just feels oppressive as well. And I think a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge that, but I do challenge, or try to challenge, people, even people who have been marginalized, to say, Okay, what would make this better? What would make it better? What can I do? What can he do? What can she do? Sometimes it’s just, “I want them to listen.” Okay, great, done. Or sometimes it’s, “I want them to speak out in this way.” Okay, let’s have that conversation. But it’s very hard for, I think, a lot of white people to understand what Black people want them to do other than feel bad, and that doesn’t get us where we need to be either.
Patsy: Don’t you think that, in all things, healing is a journey, that it’s gonna take time and conversation, and that we’re gonna have to purpose to be intentional about that.
Andrew: Yeah, and kind of what you’re saying is not trading oppression for oppression.
EJ: Well, yeah, because the reality is this was humanity that did this, and so if power and opportunity were flipped, humans would have done the same thing to different groups. It just would’ve been flipped.
Andrew: I don’t want to interrupt, but I did. That’s a powerful perspective because I think sometimes the immobility of white people in the white community in this conversation, like they’re kind of those that feel trapped. I personally feel like take a pound of flesh if you need it. I’m in it. I’m in it to win it with everybody. But not everyone’s there for different reasons. So those that, I think, feel kind of like they have a straitjacket on them a little bit and they can’t move, I think it’s because they have this feeling like they have to make all the reparations.
EJ: Own it all, yeah.
Andrew: And therefore, they can’t just take one step forward in the journey of healing, which is a process. And so I hope that those in the white community that are listening to this hear what you just said.
EJ: Yeah, it’s very important because shame is not a god and shame doesn’t help anybody. We’re not supposed to sit in that. That’s not gonna heal you. Patsy, to your point of a journey, you take a snapshot of some people today, they’re vastly different from who they were even two years ago before the pandemic. They’ve gone through different things. I think everyone would be better off if we would just commit to the conversation, and it is a back and forth.
I remember years ago, Frothy Monkey, here in Franklin, just sitting with a friend of mine who’s white, and he said, “Explain it to me. Explain some of the stuff that’s hard that I would never know.” And I said, “Did you know that I’m afraid to step outside of my house in Franklin at night and take my garbage out?” And he said, “Why?” I said, “Because a couple times when I’ve done it, the police have shown that bright light on me like I wasn’t supposed to be there, and I know that they don’t do it to my white neighbors, but they do it to me. So instead of doing that or instead of kinda being in the neighborhood, I’m darker skinned, so being in the shadows and someone who has a gun just deciding that something is happening and they shoot me dead before asking, I just don’t take my garbage out at night.” And I said, “And I know that you’ve never had to consider when you’re gonna take your garbage out, but I have to time mine.” And if I go out to take my garbage out at night for some reason, my wife always says the same thing. “Okay, be careful.” Now, I’m just leaving my door and going around the corner, the side of the house, but she’s not crazy for saying that, and I understand exactly what she’s saying, and she knows that for that 30-second period, I hope my husband comes back. And I think, I hope I get to see her again. That just happens.
And so as I said that story to him, his eyes welled with tears and his heart broke because that’s just horrible for anyone. And he didn’t say, “Oh, you’re being dramatic,” or “Oh, that’s not how it goes.” It was, Hey, I know you. I think you’re not a psycho. You’re probably telling me the truth because why would you lie about that. And if this is true, that’s terrible and I’m so sorry.
That’s like step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of the race conversation. It really is. Just being human and listening to one another. You don’t have to dig into…
“Shame doesn’t help anybody.”
Patsy: And caring that it was so hurtful.
EJ: Just caring, absolutely. And that’s not to the exclusion of other people’s stories because race is one of them, but you know, I have a friend who’s in a wheelchair. We never think about whether there are ramps at different restaurants, but if I’m with her, I think, She can’t eat here with us. She can’t eat there with us. And suddenly, because it’s impacting me and someone that I care about, I’m desperately concerned about the rights of people in wheelchairs and handicap accessibility.
Patsy: I’m glad about that because my husband is in a wheelchair.
EJ: Absolutely, absolutely.
Andrew: I think that’s part of one of the growing pains that can be a benefit from this season is, regardless of who we’re seeing for the first time… And no, I can’t see everybody all at once. Again, I don’t want anyone to feel paralysis because oh my gosh, I haven’t seen Black people before. Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen the handicapped before. Yes, just who’s in front of you and see them, and then that will inform your future of seeing people.
You’re talking about taking your trash out, which brought this question up. This is actually one of our mutual friends presented. “Raising a mixed-race child, we learned things way too late.” She’s talking about she and her husband. “The biggest lesson we wish we could have taught our son is how do you approach getting pulled over by the police.”
EJ: Oh, 10 and 2, hands on the wheel, straight ahead. Don’t move. No movements. None.
It’s interesting that your friend would say that. Did you say adopted?
Andrew: Adopted, that’s right.
EJ: Because you wouldn’t know to have had that conversation, but it’s a conversation that is had in Black households. It is as birds and bees. That’s the extra part of the conversation that every Black household has is what do you do when the police approach you, knowing, as we’ve seen on the news, that this can go really left really fast. How do you make sure that you’re not doing anything that could contribute to a bad situation? So you just do more than you probably should have to or more than some of your friends have to.
At the end of the day, I’m big in just submitting to authority. I think it’s important to do. I think listening and paying attention is what you need to do. But I think no one ever expects that the stakes could be so high. And it is hard. I have a lot of friends who have adopted children from different ethnic backgrounds, and what I always think, what I’ve always noticed, is that those parents who are willing to lay down themselves, their identity, their rights, the things that they never have to think about, and then put themselves into the shoes of who they just adopted fair better in equipping that child than the ones who try to bring their adopted child into their benefit or their world or their privilege. Because until you walk in the shoes of that person who might be marginalized because of something silly, you wouldn’t get it. You would never be able to check all the boxes and equip somebody because you would never realize the many ways in which it comes.
I drive around town here, and I guess because of the type of car that I have, I get glares. I know that a lot of the glares are kinda like, Well, what do you do? And I know that if I were an older white guy, as strapping as Andrew, I probably would not get the same glares.
Andrew: Because you drive a nice vehicle.
EJ: I drive a nice vehicle. It would just be assumed, Oh, whatever he did, he deserved to get that. Either I’ve never felt that or I don't know that I’ve ever gotten that. It’s generally, Hmm, I wonder if he’s an athlete. I wonder if he’s a musician. I couldn’t possibly be an executive or an attorney, all those things that I am, because that’s a little bit of a unicorn. And so I think those are the types of things where, until you’ve lived that, it’s hard to pass that on to somebody else.
The types of conversations that my wife and I have have even with our 5-year-old right now and plan to have with our 2-year-old son, it’s astounding, and I think if other people were around, they would say, “Why are you telling them that?”
Now here’s the big thing. A lot of people would say, “Aren’t you kind of just making some of this up, or aren’t you making it worse? Like if you ask the question or you bring this conversation, aren’t you bringing this to his space? Aren’t you the one introducing race into something that wasn’t there?” I have never ever not introduced it and then it never come up outside. It always comes up outside in the world somehow. It just does. He’s been at school, and he’s heard conversations that I know that we’ve never had from his classmates, and they’re 5. And I know that we’ve intentionally never talked about certain things about the color of his skin and that it’s different from other…
Andrew: These are common experiences.
EJ: He’s 5-years-old, and he’s hearing these things. And so it does require a level of attention to something that is unique to people who are different. I won’t even say Black people. People who are different, any difference, whatever the difference is. You have to have conversations differently.
Andrew: Well, we want to continue to have this conversation. We are committed to it, and we want to get into new levels of it. We’ve got more questions from people who have been asking honestly who don’t always get to be a part of these conversations like we do. So we’ll be back with our friend EJ Gaines with some more insight into race relations.
You are…
Patsy: I am Patsy, the Boomer.
Andrew: And I’m Andrew, the old Millennial. We’ll be back soon.
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Patsy: I don’t.
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Patsy: Patsy’s artwork?
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Patsy: Andrew, I understand, word is out, that you do another podcast with a friend of ours. Tell us about that.
Andrew: Mr. Mark Lowry, who was a guest on this podcast. He’s my co-host for Dinner Conversations with Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer. We have a ton of fun talking about all kinds of topics around the table, and you can find them at dinner-conversations.com.
Do you know something that we both love a lot of, Patsy?
Patsy: What’s that?
Andrew: That’s books.
Patsy: Food
Andrew: That too. But I hear you have a book club.
Patsy: I do have a book club. It’s called Porch Pals Book Club, and you can find out more about the book club by going to patsyclairmont.com.
Patsy: We’re having a great conversation with our friend EJ Gaines, and we’ve been taking questions that were posed to us to offer up on race relationships and how to bridge some of the distance. And I think, Andrew, you have another question.
Andrew: I do. I thought this was a great one that came through our Instastories. “If I make an unintentional misstep with a friend or a coworker surrounding their race, how do I make it right?”
EJ: Own it, own it. Own it, but don’t dwell on it because the dwelling on it is actually another offense, and a lot of people don’t realize that a lot of times something will be said in passing. And you know, there’s tons of buzzwords. From 2020 on, I feel like we’ve been inundated as we’ve been sitting in our homes and forced to just live on social media. You know the buzzwords, right? But microaggressions is one of them, and it’s this idea that something could be said to you or of you or about your race to you and it would feel… It’s small in the context. It’s not burning crosses. We’re not talking about the extreme. We’re talking about, “Oh, your hair is so interesting. How did you get it to…?” It’s like that sort of comment, where it’s like, What was that? And it happens a lot in workplaces where you’re dealing with people who don’t know you or don’t know your background but are familiar enough to be close, to ask a question, or to have watercooler talk, and they might just step in it and say something. If you do that, just own it.
Now, you don’t even have to own it in the moment. A lot of times people will go away and they sit back at their desk, and they say, I feel horrible. I can’t believe I said that. What should I do? Maybe I’ll just tuck it away. No, just go back and say, “Hey, I said something that I feel like might’ve been silly or stupid or out of line, and maybe you didn’t even take it that way, but it’s been eating me up and I’m sorry. I just didn’t mean anything by it. I’m still learning how to navigate some of these things, and if I missed it, will you please forgive me?”
Anyone who says no, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. They’ve taken offense, and they’re holding on to it, and they’re not going to let it go, so just let them have it. But most people I think will say, “Hey, I appreciate you saying that.” Either A: “I didn’t even notice it,” which will let you off the hook. So you might be torturing yourself about something that wasn’t even a thing. Or they’ll say, “Hey, thanks a lot. That happens a lot here.” And then it might open up a dialog, going back to what we were talking about with conversations. It might open up a dialog to say, “Hey, this is a better way that you could say that or ask that.” Whatever the case may be.
And I think a lot of times people, we just have to have grace for one another. There are a lot of people who are just figuring this out and are stepping into a very scary place of acknowledging a level of ignorance — and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense; I just mean, I don’t know — and their deciding, You know what, but I’m still gonna come to the table. I’m still gonna come to the conversation, come to the party, knowing that I don’t know.
Doing that, you’re gonna make a misstep, at least one, you will, and so it’s incumbent on everybody to just have grace upon grace upon grace for one another to have the conversation but, again, to stay in community and say, “You know what, this is gonna be a little messy, but we’re gonna do it because we value what we’re creating more than we value or fear what we could mess up.”
Andrew: There’s a quote from… I got this from Emmanuel Acho’s website. Of course, he’s got the Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. I just thought of this when you were speaking in that last response. “You can’t fix a problem that you do not know you have.”
And so that’s part of what we’re doing here with even having episodes that celebrate Black History Month, that highlight some of our favorite Black voices, saying there’s things I still don’t know. And you’re saying the reason to go if something pings and you go, I should not have said that, or someone says, “Hey, by the way,” that’s a learning experience. It doesn’t have to be offensive. It doesn’t have to be aggravating. It can just be, alright, learning something new. And that will only make us more well-rounded and healthy individuals in general.
This question I thought was really, really good. “Do I need to experience the full level of pain that you as a Black person experience to be sensitive, to be ‘woke,’ or to be an advocate for you?”
EJ: No, no, no. Please no. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I honestly wouldn’t. And that doesn’t help me. I would never want someone to fear for their lives or wonder if something that they received was on the basis of their own merit or because they were a certain skin color. I wouldn’t want people to walk around second guessing themselves in so many ways. I don’t think that that would help me, and yeah, I wouldn’t want anyone to experience that ever. And I don’t think you have to experience it because we’re not talking about…
Jesus identified with all of our suffering. That was it, and it was perfect, and it was done. We’re just called to empathize and to walk with one another, to consider, and to remember, and to care about the widow and the orphan. We’re not called to make ourselves widows and orphans. We’re just to take care of them, and that requires empathy. That is a biblical commandment to care about the marginalized. You don’t have to become marginalized to care about the marginalized. That’s a conversation. That’s “Hey, tell me what that feels like. I know that I didn’t walk through that. I know that that's never happened to me, and it probably will never happen to me in this way. But tell me what it feels like.” And I can tell you dehumanizing, embarrassing. Those are words that you can identify with, whether you’re Black or white. You can identify what it must feel like to feel dehumanized in a situation or embarrassed or nervous or anxious or afraid. And if you just allow me to have those emotions, and for you to be an advocate for me so that I don’t have to feel those emotions driving to work or in a workplace or at church, then we’re gravy. There’s no need for you to endure what I’ve endured, and vice versa, in order for us to care about what we’ve gone through.
Patsy: And we need to hear each other’s story, but we can’t live out each other’s story. That isn’t the goal or the purpose or the value in community. Our God talks about being a God who reveals, he brings things into the light, and that’s what we do when we’re vulnerable one with another, and I lean in and hear your story, you lean in and hear mine. It just makes all the difference in the world. But I don’t think anybody can live inside someone else’s story, as much as they may want to. And it may be good intentions, but the truth of the matter, it’s more helpful and more healing if we’ll just hear each other.
“We need to hear each other’s story, but we can’t live out each other’s story.”
EJ: Well, and the reality is I can say stuff, a lot of Black people can say stuff; it’s always stronger if someone who is not enduring what I’m enduring speaks on my behalf.
Here’s my nerdy lawyer illustration, but in the courtroom, you have character witnesses. We bring people in who are separate and apart from whatever’s going on to speak to this is who this person is, this is what I know to be true. And they’re apart from it, and it carries weight because they’re not conflicted, they’re not a part of this. So I need, as a Black man, I need an Andrew and a Patsy to say, “Hey, guys. This is what happens to our Black friends when something like this happens.”
If there’s a race-related incident in the news, many of my white friends will just text me and say, “Hey, just checking in.” And I know that they’re saying, “I’m checking in because I saw something on the news. I can imagine that that might’ve been difficult for you, and I wanted to see how you’re doing.” Now, sometimes I’m so busy working I don’t know what they’re talking about, and then I’ll say, “I’m good. Why? Something happen?” And they’ll say, “Oh, I just saw the news about such-and-such.” “Oh, man. Send me a link.” But other times, I definitely saw it and I’m definitely afraid and I’m definitely busying myself and I’m definitely trying to just cope with it, and that message is all I need. I need them to feel it, and they could never feel it. I just need to know that I’m not alone in it. That’s the best thing that someone could do.
Andrew: That’s mutually empowering for us to know, on any level, that we’re not alone. I think the yin and yang of relationship is that when one is struggling, the other is able to carry, and then as long as we can… The empowering part of that is the mutuality of that and knowing that I don’t hold the key to the kingdom for the Black community as a white person who has had more access to power and to privilege, that they also can carry my weight at certain times too. And so I think that’s a really wonderful openness that you’re sharing there.
This question… This individual said, “Oh, here is something I wonder.”
“That’s mutually empowering for us to know, on any level, that we’re not alone.”
EJ: I love that.
Andrew: And she said, “Do people of color ever feel like they are being used for virtue-signaling, i.e., a president promising to appoint a Black woman to the supreme court. For instance, it’s one thing to say, ‘I’ve searched the country, and the most qualified individual for the court position happens to be a Black woman.’ That would be amazing, but just to say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna look like a woke president and put a Black woman on the court,’ feels very much like that Black woman is being used by someone else as an object lesson. If I were Black, I feel like I would be offended, but it may not be that way at all for that Black woman. I’m curious.”
EJ: Ooo.
Patsy: Yeah, that’s a whole lot right there. Let’s say this is not a show who airs on the side of political issues.
EJ: Who sent that?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. This is not our question.
EJ: No, no, I know. But it’s a good one, and it’s timely in the sense that this is what’s happening right now.
Andrew: And that can mean in the workplace, yeah.
EJ: But it’s real. Yes, that happens all the time. It happens from every political party, from every leader. The issue is one of power and control, and I am convinced that people who want to gain power and maintain control will use anything at their disposal to do so. Now, whether you do that in a way that is God-honoring and full of integrity will depend on who you are, and then if you don’t do it that way, it also depends on who you are.
And then I think we have this huge gasoline tanker called the media and social media that amplifies it all, and suddenly, things that are commonplace — and that’s how this happens. My wife always says, hey, political science is a major in college because it is a science and it’s being done and you can spend four years learning how to do to humans what you want to do to them. You can convince them to believe something ideologically and politically that you want them to believe on the basis of what we teach you for four years to the tune of thousands of dollars. It is that much a discipline. And so the idea that politicians don’t virtue-signal or don’t use race, socioeconomics, education, and all these things and promises to get exactly what they want, to gain and maintain power — yeah, of course they do.
When I hear, for example, that there’s going to be a promise made for a marginalized group of people, I think, Okay, we’ll see. We’ll see because, you know. And not every promise that’s been made is good for the group that it’s been made to, and so that takes an informed voter to understand that. But I do think that there is benefit, and I’m only mentioning this in the context of the question, there is some benefit to saying, You know what, for however many years we’ve had a supreme court, we’ve never had a Black woman on the court. No, that either means that there are now Black women qualified in the hundreds of years that we’ve had one or we’ve not done a good enough job identifying them.
Patsy: Right.
EJ: And so I read Biden as saying, “You know what…”
Andrew: Oh, is that who we were talking about?
EJ: I think that’s the guy. I hear him as saying, “I’m going to be intentional. I’m going to believe that our education system is fair, that our opportunity pool and the pool of candidates is existent, and I’m going to look there first, because in all of these years, I don’t know that any president has looked there first, and that’s what I’m gonna do.” Now, what I hope is that when he looks there, if he finds that everyone is deplorable, then he’ll broaden this pool. But I don’t fault him for saying, “You know what, somehow we always have managed to just skip right over any qualified candidate of this background.”
Andrew: Well, yeah. And if you think about it, at one point in time, we only looked at the pool in certain realms to white men.
EJ: Absolutely. That was the rule.
Andrew: And then began to open it up to at least white women, so it can make us relax a little bit about going to a certain pool first to see if there are qualified candidates, workers, whatever, if we go, Oh wait, we’ve always had to expand in looking.
EJ: But are his intentions wholly altruistic? I don’t know that I’ve met a wholly altruistic politician. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one. And I love a lot of them, I really do, and I pray for them, but I think it is an occupational hazard. I think that you are constantly juggling multiple plates, pulling at different levers where this is benefiting someone but I also have to slip this in, and I think it is an occupation wrought with ulterior motive. I think that you can’t do it without having them. Why I would never want to do it.
Patsy: Speaking of intelligent Black women, I want to talk about Janice for a minute. I’m getting off this topic.
Andrew: Do you see how she…?
EJ: She bridged us right to a safe place.
Andrew: We’re at the Louvre now.
Patsy: Well, this is an artistic moment. We’re at the Louvre, we’ve just come across the bridge, we’ve had interaction, and we see this beauty of a woman. Tell us how you met her.
EJ: Oh, my wife. I love my wife. I gush over my wife in every interview that I do or conversation I have. I generally talk about her more than whatever we’re talking about.
Janice Gaines is just an angel on earth. I’m just convinced of it. We met when we were teenagers. We were 15 at the time. There was a program called Math & Science for Minority Students — MS2 is what it was called — and it was in Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. And they took students that were African American, Hispanic American, and Native American from across the country, flew them to Phillips Academy for three consecutive summers in high school, six weeks at a time, and we stayed at a boarding school there at Phillips Academy, and we took graduate-level math and science classes. We were nerds. It was a math camp. And we did discrete mathematics with ISETL, international SET language, and we did human genome project testing with pipettes. I put fruit flies to sleep, drosophila, and woke them up and tested their gender, all these things, and it’s so fun.
And Janice was from Memphis, and I was from Chicago, and we’re still friends with a lot of our friends from the program. We just connected over music and over… I mean, if you’ve ever seen her smile, she’s just joy.
Patsy: She lights up a room.
EJ: She lights up a room, and I loved her from jump and I pursued her. I am so glad she’s not here; I can tell this story. I pursued her for 10 years, and she shot me down.
Andrew: Ten years?
EJ: Ten years. I knew that she was going to be my wife, and she shot me down. Now, she would want me to say, and it’s fair to say, that it just wasn’t the right time and she knew that. And it wasn’t. It would’ve been a disaster. She says, “You were my best friend, and I just didn’t want to mess that up with a relationship going awry or anything.”
And so finally, at a season where I had felt like I had laid down the idea of her, which was an idol in my mind at that point. I was in law school, like if I’m not marrying Janice, I’m not marrying anyone. This is over. Just whatever, God. You clearly don’t love me. And she had gone through her own personal metamorphosis of sorts, and that’s when God said, Okay, now look at each other. And we always talk about it. We were in New York at the same time. She had come to visit a mutual friend of ours, and I was taking her from Queens, where I lived, to Manhattan to kinda hand her off to our friend. We don’t remember what the conversation was, but she said something about I realize I’ve never trusted another guy like I trust you and that all this time I’ve been trying to preserve you as my best friend when I realized I’m supposed to be marrying my best friend.
And somehow we got off of that train, and we were together. We were engaged months later and married the following year, and now 14 years this summer. And I finally got Janice. I finally got her.
Andrew: And she ain’t going nowhere.
EJ: She ain’t going nowhere. We’ve got two kids, and she’s in it. I’ve got her forever. Yeah, I love my wife.
Patsy: She is amazing, and when she told me the story, the love story, I couldn’t get past math.
Andrew: Or disorphosis or whatever.
EJ: Drosophila.
Patsy: Did you hear Lucy Swindoll’s story about her brother raising fruit flies? Had them in the refrigerator, she didn’t know it. They got loose. Oh, it was awful.
EJ: I can see Lucy telling this story.
Patsy: Yeah, it was wonderful. Laughed and laughed about that, but that’s the only time I’ve ever heard about them. So math and science is not the material that leads me to love, but I’m so glad it led the two of you.
EJ: It worked. It worked with us. Yeah, it really did. You know, she’s still my best friend. I mean, we laugh all day. We just laugh. Everything is just a joke, and we just have fun. And it helps us through the hardest of times or the most uncertain of times, knowing this is my best friend, I love her and she loves me, and whatever it is, that’s what we got, and that’s gonna be the fuel for it. And it does. It fuels us.
Andrew: You know, I wonder, listening to you talk throughout this whole time and then talk about your relationship with Janice, I wonder if some of our kind of left-footedness right now in culture has to do with maybe not many of us having the most stabilizing relationships in our own homes that we can then mirror or be propelled from. If there’s insecurity in the home, and we know this for children especially, but I think it’s true for us adults too, it can really leave us feeling foundationless in our relationships with our co-workers or our relationships with our friends, or in relationship to what maybe media is telling us right now and how to discern that because we don’t have… You know what I’m saying?
EJ: Some firm foundation.
Andrew: Maybe that insecurity is driving us, and I just wonder if that’s not a signal that we’re in a really strange spiritual place.
EJ: I think we are. It’s funny. This morning I was coming back from dropping my son off at school, and I was on the phone with Janice, and there was a car in front of me that was trying to signal to someone else in front of him to drive. You know, the light had turned green, and they just hadn’t moved fast enough. I mean, it could have been a millisecond, if anything, but you know, he had seen it coming because the other yellow light and then red, so he just knew it was coming, so he was ready. And he honked the horn and flailed his hands, and I started laughing because from behind, it looked almost like cartoonish. It was so animated that it was unreal, and I said to Janice, “This man is crazy in front of me. What is his issue?” And she said, “What did he do?” So I’m trying to tell her what happened over the phone, and she said, “You know, we’ve lost the ability to be kind to one another and to just connect. Everyone is at their wits end, and we have no more sense of community, no more sense of connectedness.” And she said, “This season has just severed that.”
And I think, to your point, it’s kind of like, you know, we don’t owe anyone anything. We really do walk around thinking, I gotta protect me and mine. I’m out for myself, just like they’re out for themselves. And what it’s done is made it so that we’re not connected. We don’t have courtesy. We don’t have grace. Common courtesy in a grocery store, I mean, it is just like race to the finish, race to this, and just look out for yourself. And I do think, to your point about the spiritual foundation, my resolve for that is not to, Okay, well, just be nice to people, nice to people, nice to people. It is to remember, Wait, I’m okay. Why am I okay? God said I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m gonna be okay. And if I’m okay, then I don’t have to flip out about who’s driving differently or who’s cutting me off in traffic. I’m okay. But that is so internal, and it’s the prep work that you gotta do before you leave the house because once you get out, yeah, everyone is going to be infuriating if you haven’t done the prep work to remind yourself, I’m okay, right. Yes, I’m okay. I’m here. Stuff is hard, but I’m not alone. And you kinda have to go through that checklist and remind yourself that you’re not what the media says that you are, or what the latest news report says is going on is not what’s going on to you right now. And the fearmongering and the anger and the name-calling, that’s just not real.
You come off of social media for a minute and you sit with friends for coffee, and you realize, Oh wait, everyone’s not angry. No, they’re not angry. Go to Starbucks. Everyone’s fine.
Andrew: No, they're not. And we still have money to buy Starbucks.
EJ: Absolutely. It’s like there’s this doomsday, isolated taunting that keeps happening to us when we look at social media and scroll through the news feeds and 24-hour news cycle.
Andrew: Which we do alone.
EJ: And we do it alone, or we do it in an echo chamber where we call our friends or send the people we know will be furious with us the articles. And it’s like no, no, no, no, no. Go to a park. If you just go to a park and you stumble upon a stranger, you’ll see that they don’t hate you. You’ll see that they smiled at you. That’s a big stronghold that the world — I’m talking about the whole globe — has right now, and it is spurred on by the pandemic I think.
Patsy: One of the benefits of my height, which is limited, is that strangers come and are always offering to reach things on high shelves, and I think there’s some conversations that are on high shelves that we can’t reach without some assistance. And we thank you for being an assistant to the community here, to the greater community on some of the social media efforts, because we all need each other to step this through.
Patsy: Bridges is produced by my co-host, Andrew Greer.
Andrew: And co-produced by my co-host, Patsy Clairmont. Our podcast is recorded by Jesse Phillips.
Patsy: And sometimes my son, Jason Clairmont.
Andrew: At the Arcade in Franklin, Tennessee. Jesse Phillips is also our editor and mixes our show. And our theme music is written by Kyle Buchanan and yours truly, and all of the instruments of the music were played by Kyle Buchanan at Aries Lounge in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Our transcripts are provided by Rachel Worsham. Thanks, Rachel, for all your work.
Patsy: If you like what you’ve been listening to, you can help us out by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to our show.
Andrew: For more information about Patsy, myself, or to read transcripts and to listen to more episodes, go to bridgesshow.com.
Patsy: Catch you next time.