The Lesson in Jameis Winston’s Words

When We Judge

In post-game interviews, an excited Winston gushed to reporter after reporter and into microphone after microphone in a “country sort of way.” The kind of way a kid does when he’s so excited and can’t quite find words to describe his joy. And Jameis was harshly judged. Sadly, I was among the guilty.

I remember that my father and I watched each second of the 20-year olds’ interviews and simultaneously reacted with Kevin Hart’s popular “No, he wasn’t ready!” comedy routine. We chuckled, shook our heads, cringed as he misplaced words and clunked through sentences with awkward syntax. “Not another black man making us look bad” we told each other in our private moment.

Dee Dee McCarron wasn’t so private. The mother of National Championship-winning Alabama quarterback, AJ McCarron, candidly tweeted to her 25,000 followers: “Am I listening to English?” Part of me wanted to get upset, cry foul, and talk about racism and classism in my usual self-righteous tone. But I like my glass house too much, and I’ve run out of social media stones to throw. I’m no better than her nor Phil Robertson, who only saw “happy blacks.” [pullquote]I, along with many other minorities, am ashamed to be embarrassed by my own.[/pullquote]

A Look at Roots

What causes us to feel this way? Sure we could point to deep, systemic (my favorite word) issues that have been festered over centuries of oppression. But the root is much more fundamental to humanity. See, I’m a walking contradiction. And honestly, I would have never believed this five years ago. Then, I was naive enough to think that racism was an overblown cultural issue, in an Ann Coulter-like blindness to what I had faced covertly again and again. But now, after tasting the tartness of racism in my twenties, my pendulum has swung to the other side so quickly that Tarzan himself would be jealous.

Frankly, in music, preaching, theology, fashion, sports and culture, I just want white people to know we’re better than them. Better, even with the years of racial epithets on athletic fields and lack of opportunities in coaching staffs, though we were just as good. Better, despite the decades of locking us out of seminaries and institutions of higher learning for fear we would actually be educated. Better, in the face of all your classist arguments that Christian rappers are “disobedient cowards” and “practicing sinners.” [pullquote]I’ll admit it. I want to make Jim Crow eat his last name.[/pullquote]

Air of Superiority

My desire for every member of the black community to collectively prove that we are superior causes me to gag at young men whose belt-lines hug their thighs and wish they would “act like human beings.” [pullquote position=”right”]I saw clearly in the post-game, that I have become what I most despise in others.[/pullquote] I walk in an air of superiority that should disgust me.

In our quest to eradicate the Body of Christ of all traces of bigotry and discrimination, let’s not be what we believe to behold in others. May our gaze truly be fixed on the example displayed in Christ. In him, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, no slave or free, male or female. No matter how differently we may structure our sentences or describe our situations, I pray that I learn from Jameis Winston and choose daily to set my superiority at the foot of the Cross.

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