You’ve been at that event — some graduation, some concert, some ceremony — where someone gets up to the mic, shakes their head and says “see, the news cameras should be here showing the good things all these kids are doing, instead of focusing on the bad a few do.” The audience always agrees because we know, despite how we are represented sometimes, most black kids do graduate high school and most have never even touched a gun. But to someone outside of our culture, just looking at the news, they’d think we were all wired to shoot and run.
This is the same “SMH” moment I had when I read “From Eddie Long to Kim Burrell: Why Millennials Should Abandon the Church” on BET.com yesterday. It’s the same moment millions of black Christians experience when Black Twitter spends days telling them that they are all just a bunch of hypocritical bishops and fanatical singers.
My longtime friends love and respect me. They think I’m a pretty good guy, but every so often some send me a screen shot captioned “this is why I don’t go to church.” My decade of unconditional love for them, even while knowing all their successes and failures, beauty and ugliness, seems less impactful than a clip of some far-off YouTube preacher that went ballistic. A lifetime of knowing me and my Christian mom, our imperfections and our love, is immediately canceled by a trending topic. No matter how solid my Christ rep is, it can quickly be voided out by one crazy sermon thousands of miles away.
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source: BET | Jonathan McReynolds
