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How to Humanist asks life’s questions big and small with the help of brilliant humans along the way.
AD:
This is Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association. I'm getting married this summer, and we could not be more excited, but weddings can be a lot. On top of dealing with caterers and photographers, it just feels challenging to plan a ceremony that both honors our humanist beliefs and my fiancee's Jewish culture and traditions.
There is no script for something like that. That's why my fiancee and I are getting help from a humanist celebrant, our friend Greg Epstein, who also happened to be the first-ever guest on this podcast. If you're preparing to celebrate your own love story but you're not excited about a traditional religious celebration, you should consider working with a humanist celebrant like Greg.
The Humanist Society can connect you with professional humanist celebrants who are excited to help you and your partner craft a ceremony that reflects your unique story, background, and values. Humanist celebrants are frequently sought out for interfaith, intercultural, and same-sex marriages, but they are available to everyone, and they can legally perform marriages in all 50 states.
If you wanna explore what it means to invite a humanist celebrant into your wedding, visit thehumanistsociety.org. We've got people who can help.
SHAY:
Welcome to How to Humanist. It's Shay Leonia. I got to go to my very first, gasp, New York City Pride Parade today. I have never, ever in my entire life attended a Pride parade, and I don't know how I managed to dodge it all these years, but shame, shame on me. I will never miss another Pride parade if I can help it.
That was such a wonderful life-changing experience to be surrounded by all of these people who were proud, proud, proud people, and just full of love and acceptance and joy and celebration and reverence. It was just, oh, what an experience to just be around everyone with all of that.
You know, even though I recorded this episode with Je' recently and not today, I do wanna say that I felt very similarly when I was sitting across from them, hearing the way that they speak about themselves and about our inner knowing and about how we have to show up in the world and how we have to do better.
This episode, I'm going to warn you, if you are somebody who learns in an auditory way, I would absolutely suggest that you not try to multitask because Je' is dropping gems all through this episode. I mean, when I tell you I got off of the recording and I immediately went to Court, my supervisor, and I was like, "Court, I need you to listen to this episode because Je' just changed my life."
And if you listen to this episode, I hope that it will change your life too.
What I will say about the auditory part, I am a visual learner, so as Je' was speaking, I was absolutely translating what they were saying into like a Bob Ross painting sort of moment. I listened as Je' painted happy little trees and painted the little seagulls flying over. If you paint the picture as Je' is speaking, you are going to easily be able to follow along with what it is that they are saying.
I am definitely encouraging you to examine yourself and to be willing to be called in by Je'. They do this entirely with love, and I'm just so grateful that they took the time to share their time with us.
But I do wanna read their bio to you. So Reverend Je' Exodus Hooper, Doctor, is an arts and cultural community curator, clergy leader, and scholar who serves in Beacon Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Summit, New Jersey, the ethical culture movement, and other congregational humanist spaces.
Without further ado, the incredible Je' Exodus Hooper.
SHAY:
So I discovered that you know Lenny Harold.
JE':
Yes.
SHAY:
I don't know him well. I feel like I met him at an event years ago, and we've stayed Instagram friends since, but I was just like, "Oh, it's Lenny."
JE':
Yeah. No, we're like real family. That's my buddy. He's actually performed for y'all's conference and stuff like that.
SHAY:
No wonder there's that connection there. Oh, got it.
JE':
Yeah. So when I was making my film back in 2019 called Humanitas, I got more acquainted with Lenny. Then we remained friends, and then I had him come out. We were in Denver, Colorado for that conference, and we had Lenny come out and perform for everybody.
SHAY:
Wow. And that was right before I came on.
JE':
Yeah. Yeah. My thing is just, let's bring in this idea, because Lenny's so about cosmic, and I love this idea of cosmic. I was just reading one of the books on cosmic humanism, this framework. It's an old book, probably 1930, but it's called Cosmic Humanism, and it talks about our celestial connection to all things regarding the universe. He makes these scientific claims around how... And it leans into a lot of the things that, because of my tradition is ethical culture, it leans into that ethical humanism that Felix Adler, the founder of ethical culture, was playing into. So I was very curious to see how these two were in conversation.
SHAY:
That's so interesting. Because I remember when I first came on board and I followed the American Humanist Instagram page, and I saw he was following, and I was like, I wonder what Lenny has to do... Of any of the people that I'm connected with on Instagram, I would have never thought an R&B singer that I'm friendly with on air would be following us.
JE':
Believe me, darling, 'cause everybody was like, wow. I'll bring you your folklore we're comfortable with. You may be a little bit of that Norah Jones sound, but when we need to really spice it up, you bring your indie artists, and you bring your R&B sound, you bring your rock. Because I think that music is a big part of our ethos as just humans.
We are living in a rhythm constantly. When we think about it, even Grace Jones talks about that, right? Being a slave to the rhythm. I think sometimes music is a helpful way to disrupt. And sometimes we don't realize that we're listening to certain sounds because we were cultured to do certain kinds of sounds.
And so, as someone who can go immediately listening from R&B to country, from country to gospel, from gospel to jazz and blues, from blues to an array, and then when people say they like everything, it's fascinating to see how much of what everything means. Because certain things are just a particular taste, but not necessarily a way to say, how do I counteract the information that I'm receiving about how I'm expected to live? Music does inform us that way. Any art does that. Arts and ethics is a whole other conversation in which I lean into.
SHAY:
Ah. Let me just tell you. So one of my favorite things to do is to go to the Korean spa and have the little Korean grandmas scrub every bit of dead skin off of me, and it is the funnest, most painful, most rewarding experience ever. And I am fully expecting our conversation to go that way. Because I'm just so intrigued by your mind and how it works. And I just know that I'm gonna come out of it like a fresh new baby. Come on! But it might be painful at times, so I'm along for the ride.
JE':
Great. I'm so excited about this.
Yeah, no, thank you. I'm excited as well. It's funny, I'm grateful for Emily 'cause Emily knows, I'm like, "Don't call me if there's no spice to it."
SHAY:
It has to have flavor.
JE':
Yeah, it has to have flavor. And I hold true to my three values. At the end of the day, we keep it real. Like humanism means nothing if you can't keep it real. I'm not talking about no science, I ain't talking about no logic, I'm not just talking about reason, I'm talking about keeping it real. Be real with yourself, be real with how you showing up, be real.
And I think that's one of the hardest things.
The other part for me is really it needs to be attached to freedom and liberation. Thank you for the justice work. Justice is a great marker for how freedom should look like in the time that we need it, but I need us to start thinking perpetually further. I think we need to begin to engage in ethical imagination where we actually can really think about what does freedom look like for those further down the line, right?
The freedoms that you and I are working on now as justice needs to propel us forward to have a frontier conversation. We are stuck in a tradition, a beautiful thought tradition as a practice, but then we are also in a place where humanism has been such a thought tradition that has engaged this idea of transformation.
But tradition and transformation should end up producing trajectory. And if we're not trajecting forward, I'm really concerned about where we're going.
And so these values around keeping it real, around freedom and liberation, and then probably the one that most people really struggle with the most with me and the tension of it is really, you gotta have some sexy.
I will stay there all day every day. And this is a problem because this keeps us from feeling intergenerational. The time that you felt like you looked good was probably in your 20s, your 30s, and the...
SHAY:
Oh, no, I'm looking my best right now, thank you.
JE':
Come on. And I really... I've appreciated when I meet some of our more seasoned folk who are in their 70s and maybe just retired or in their 80s, and I go to a congregation and these little white women go, "I just feel so sexy." And I want them to embrace their beauty.
Beauty is not just an aesthetic property. It is a prophetic one, meaning that it constantly perpetuates truth to power. So if I refuse to look broken, if I refuse to look like I am downtrodden, even though I'm dealing with an administration that says I am less than, that it will constantly remind me that I am not the global majority but the minority, if it constantly keeps doing that, I am stuck in a place where I have to perpetuate beauty. I will do it for an act of resistance.
I will do it to also make sure that it's my resilience. I will do it because it requires my aliveness. And therefore, my humanism is rooted in these three components of understanding that it is realness, it is freedom, and it is a lot of sexy. And those are the things that line me up to say, "I will fight back anything, whether you like me or not."
Hell, that's half Scorpio in there, right? The Scorpio in me is like, "I wish you would."
SHAY:
I wanna stay on the sexy for a bit.
JE':
Yeah. Let's go.
SHAY:
Let's lean into that because a movement that has done a great job at centering white, academic, older men for such a long time, I look at you doing your sermons in front of congregations that look like that, and it's just fascinating to me. But what does that look like to actually bring forth the sexy?
JE':
Thank you for that question 'cause I think one of the things, it starts off as casual for a lot of people. Let's just be real, my undergrad was in jewelry and fashion. So I didn't come to this work because I went to some kind of smart school. I went to art school, honey. You might get a math equation every once in a while, but we might be able to do please excuse my dear Aunt Sally.
SHAY:
Yeah.
JE':
But otherwise...
SHAY:
I haven't heard that in so long.
JE':
Baby. Okay? So when we talk about, "Oh, reason, logic," that was not the narrative for me. And I can say this because of the adults in my life, my mother and father as well as my grandmother. We have to keep in mind that they were African American. They were also baby boomers. My grandmother was born in the '30s. My great-grandmother was born just at the turn of the century, right?
So I got a great-grandmother, a grandmother, and then mother and father. So we're looking at 1940, 1930, 1910. I had the opportunity to have those folk inform my life, and I'm born in the '80s.
So we have to talk about a real thing that was imposed on the Black body as a politic, that social respectability politic was very important on Black people, how their hair was, how the fashion was, how to be accepted. This did not just come because Black people wanted to be accepted by white people. This happened as a result of social resistance as well.
And one of the biggest things is it becomes, going from this kind of social drag performance, I'll play into that a bit, that Black people had already been inspired by their previous ancestors who took care of themselves in general.
So when you talk about the Korean scrubbing, my grandmama was gonna scrub me until the dirt was in the tub, okay? That wasn't nothing new. I ain't never seen no little loofah thing when I grew up. I was like, "What is that?" You need a washcloth. You need a rag. You didn't take the soap bar and rub it on your body and think that you were clean.
That Zest fully clean commercial, I grew up in a Black home. You had a washcloth. You washed your face because you got the dirt off of you. This is not also just for people of color. This also deals with the working class who were having colorful experiences, 'cause most blue collar worker white folk, if I think about even Baltimore, I remember watching some of our Polish neighbors scrubbing dead skin off because of working.
So why do I bring this up? I bring this up because when we think about aesthetics and dressing, when I'm going to preach to these folk, they are looking at it like, "Oh, you just like fashion." No. My great-grandmother could not be touched by a doctor if she was sick because she wasn't dressed to come to the doctor's office. So you weren't gonna serve a Black woman any kind of care, even if they could afford it, if they were not dressed to a particular standard.
Then you go to the 1930s, let's stay with Harlem, let's stay with my grandmother. My grandmother had furs. Now today, if I put on my grandmother's fur, I can tell you how many eco friends are like, "Oh my God." And I'm like, "Hold on. Uh-uh. Grandma gave this to me. This is an upcycle piece, baby. And it is warm, and I prefer to be warm."
But having fur was an act of resistance for folk in Harlem who would be like, "No, we deserve to live in an environment and feel classy and feel..." That was not afforded to Black folks. So when folk felt like they made it, that was a way of also them participating. It was a double entendre, if you will, because it is a bit of drag, and then there's a bit of this like, "I have to survive."
So can you survive, is the real question. There's the tension. Black survival was rooted in the aesthetic ability. This is why I use the framework of Larry Neal Jones from the Black Revolutionary Art Movement. What he says is, "Aesthetics and ethics are one." And so what he's talking about is the Black Power movement.
If we think about what we saw for the Black Power movement, they all dressed in black. They all had Afros. They all had gloves. They might have had fists. The aesthetic and ethics were one. The way that one showed up in their power showed how they demonstrated it. The way that care was taking place showed how it happened in the community.
When Huey Newton is being criminalized and Black Panthers are being seen with guns, that's because they understood the penalty code around guns. Malcolm X was saying, "Look." The New York penalty code said he wasn't a violent man. He'd never put his hand on anybody. But he said straight up, "If you put your hands on me, I have a right to put my hands on you," 'cause the New York penalty code said that's what you could do. But it came out of a Black person's mouth, so you didn't expect the cultural aesthetic to match the ethic.
And so what I've done is, when I go into a space, the first thing that we are having a conversation about is, Black people are oftentimes on the margins. That exists. That's a very real thing, but it also has a tension. And when I show up, I make sure I show up in a fullness and in a way that says, "Look."
I have to show you an act of resistance constantly in my congregational spaces. I have to show and demonstrate a posture that holds the tension of what it means to be pluralistically Black.
Because the tension there is that I didn't just make it because I have a PhD. My degrees are based out of a systemic system that says I had to be educated to show up and at least have a platform, 'cause you wouldn't hear me if I didn't have a degree.
SHAY:
And twice as educated.
JE':
Exactly. A doctorate of ministry and a PhD in philosophy and interdisciplinary arts. Two masters. That's not a response to, "I love school." That's a response of, "Will you hear me now? Hello?"
[SHAY interjects: This is very meta in me explaining this, but I just want to go a little deeper than Je' is going here because some of you might not be aware of this idea that Black people need to work twice as hard as their white counterparts for the same job, for the same recognition, for the same credibility.
And I want to tell you, it's a thousand percent true, unfortunately. And this is supported by research, sociological, physiological, and economic research. And I want to highlight one of those studies right now. So there have been studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research that demonstrated that Black workers are often more closely scrutinized, face higher bars for keeping jobs, and are let go more readily for similar errors compared to white counterparts.
It is as simple as that. And if you need to look further, all I'm going to say is tan suit.]
JE':
This is systemic arrangements that then I become, I'm an educated hustler. I blend the beauty of being educated, but also the street smarts of having to figure out how I'm gonna survive, 'cause that's what Black folk do, right?
I also show up in the fullness of who I am because I come from house ball and queer community and Black trans women, and the question is always, what is the category?
[SHAY interjects: Paris Is Burning. Pose. Watch it.]
JE':
You don't have to tell me what we have to talk about. Just tell me the category you want to talk about, darling, and I'm going to work this runway, because there will not be anything that I have not touched or at least experienced or at least researched, done some me-search, research, and we-search to do this work.
[SHAY interjects: Let me just tell you, I have learned from the post-production of these podcasts that if I speak over guests and affirm what they're saying or anything like that, I will drown out unfortunately what they are saying. So I do my damnedest to keep my mouth shut, but if only you knew the way I am bursting inside to affirm. If only... I am just out of sheer restraint getting through this with silence and just making as many faces as I can.]
SHAY:
One of them is like a legacy that you've just cracked my brain wide open on their possible origins. First of all, not wearing your outside clothes on the bed. I would never get caught in a Black household sitting on anyone's bed with my jeans on. But I never thought of where that came from.
And then there was a specific incident where I was bringing a friend to spend Thanksgiving with my chosen family. And my chosen family happens to be Black, and the grandfather in the home came upstairs to meet my friend, who also happened to be a Black person. So it was very interesting, 'cause I was watching this intergenerational gap in real time.
He was reclining on the couch. And when the grandfather came over to introduce each other, my friend held out his left hand like this and stayed reclined. And the grandfather, never having met this person in his life, slapped his hand and he said, "Give me the right hand, boy." And I was just like, "Oh."
And everybody just froze because to him, that was a sign of respect and decency. Sit the fuck up and give me your right hand. A Tribe Called Quest warned us about giving the right hand too, but I never put those pieces together until hearing you just now.
JE':
Yeah. Heck, that goes back to... And you gotta keep in mind, some of the folk who were also, and let me just be theological for a few minutes, and historically theological.
SHAY:
Absolutely.
JE':
Black spiritual practice that was influenced by Christianity and white Christianity had insight on certain ethics and behaviors, right? We read in sacred texts where Jesus says that if somebody smacks you, you turn the other cheek.
SHAY:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
JE':
So we read that oftentimes, and we're like, "Oh," like it means ignore. I love this arrangement. Beautiful formula. So everyone was under empire with Roman rule, right? The smacking oftentimes was a backhand to show that somebody was beneath you. So when this statement is made, the statement is about demonstrating the backhand. You come down with the backhand. That means that you have turned the other cheek. You've been hit to have your cheek forced down.
If you are going to be smacked again, here is a revolutionary message. As an act of resistance, turn the other cheek. Why? Because if the person smacked you down, that means they have to bring their hand up, and if you brought your hand forward with the palm open, it made that person your equal.
SHAY:
Stop. What?
JE':
Boom. It is a moment of equalness. So when we see even, when we used to see children scolded back in the day and they had a forward hand, it was very much so about that person being your equal, at your level, or related to you in some kind of dynamic. If you smacked somebody down, they were a disgrace.
See, these are just customs. So before we even begin to think about this as religion and context and sacred and all that other stuff, we actually have, as cultural humanists, people who really want to engage culture and understand the formations of culture and how they inform our practices, that is a performativity that has been arranged in our life that allows for us to see the actual formation of somebody being our equal.
You can just see by just the very movement of my hand, somebody becomes your equal. You might not wanna be hit, but a forward hand has always been an equal.
SHAY:
I can't even tell you. My whole body right now is reacting to everything you're saying. This is fascinating.
SHAY:
Okay, so cultural humanism. Am I fair to say that right now that's where we are lacking and that's where the white flight is occurring?
JE':
Oof. So you read my article then?
SHAY:
I did. It was, oh my God. I try not to research my guests too hard, but with you I just couldn't stop myself.
JE':
And it's, look, I wanna tell you, I appreciate a call and response, full embodied, shared experience. You are not taking up my time. I'm quite assured we can do what we need to do and still allow for you to be embodied, 'cause I cannot do an unembodied human at all. Otherwise, I don't know what we're doing.
We basically are doing what Alice Walker wrote in The Color Purple, when Celie said, "I just lay down and let him do his business." I refuse to allow for you to just let me do my business. I need you to be with me in relationship and in community.
Oof. The problem is that our journey, before I even get to our topic around cultural humanism, the big problem that we need to begin to examine with our white flight humanism is that we have always been in service to and very seldom in relationship with.
And what we call relationship is actually a framework that says, "I am not in touch with you, but I'm intentional with you." I need a people that want to be more sensorial in their practice, that they are in touch with each other and not intentional with each other. That is where we fall short, because we refuse to be in relationship because we would prefer to be in service to, as if we have something always to offer and never anything to participate in.
SHAY:
The room has been read.
JE':
I know.
So to your question about cultural humanism. Yes. I told you, this is what we do. Okay? So...
SHAY:
Go for it.
JE':
Cultural humanism, it started off very premature. Because when I had found out about humanism, let's just be real, I came out of Pentecostalism.
SHAY:
Is Pentecostal where they catch the ghost and...
JE':
Yes.
SHAY:
Okay.
JE':
Catch the ghost, speak in another language and...
SHAY:
Yeah.
JE':
So right, but I wouldn't give it that much energy if I were you. And that is the reason why early in my life, most people called me a holiness humanist or ethical evangelist, and it was because anything that I could receive, accept, affirm, and embrace, I could make it my own.
But it was because I understood the value of doing my own me-search. Making sure that I was not only reflective with my research, but revolutionary with my research. There's a big difference. That then I could put myself in formation with others in collective shared experience to do a we-search, was where I began to actually say, "I can do this."
Because it wasn't religion that was holding me. My artistry held me. My creativity held me. I was a dancer. So it wasn't about being Pentecostal. I just like to dance. Still to this day, anybody will tell you I love to dance. If you want to find me in my ministry, find me at the club. If you want to find me when I am trying to organize and prepare my next speech, I need to be so embodied.
I have a wonderful dance pole right here to put myself and my body in sermonic meditation to actually understand what I am trying to do and convince myself, because I have to understand myself as an intimate being. Though we think most people who do pole work are oftentimes only sexual, they are intimate beings.
This is an Audre Lorde framework about the erotic and the knowledge of the erotic, and that the knowledge of the erotic is an intimate understanding of how one engages with their most wholesome and hospitable self to say they love themselves again and again. What good is philosophy if it is not a study of love and knowledge? It is the love of knowledge.
So I'm gonna make love with my knowledge. And Audre Lorde just pushes me a little bit further to be more embodied by saying it's the erotic of knowledge, so therefore I engage myself in the intimate parts of myself as someone who understands myself as Black, queer, non-binary, with disabilities, living publicly and out loud, openly talking about HIV for 14, 16 years.
That is not oftentimes in our space. And to show up doesn't require for me to just be confined to narratives off of statistics, but courageous. I tell people, "Don't love me out of convenience. Love me because you're courageous."
We have a love in our movement that often is rooted in compassion and service. I tell people that don't last long for certain folk, especially global majority. They can read through it. They have very healthy discernment. People of the global majority and those who have been on the margins and sit in the trenches of the margins can actually articulate very clearly, "I can tell you don't love me. You can show me all the service you give, but your affection is lacking."
And it's because a person that loves to do service has to love themselves enough to wanna do the service. If that's removed, we cannot do culture without love.
Womanist framework would say it like this: women are the curators of culture. So a lot of the framework around congregational formation or a lot of the talks that I do around embodiment, that is an intimate knowing. That is an Audre Lorde framework. That is a bell hooks framework. That is pulling from the legacy of various people. Zora Neale Hurston. That's not made-up stuff. Those are Black femme, Black women, Black queer folk who set out to cultivate a culture so that they could fall in love with themselves and turn in on themselves to give and birth something new.
You can't have revolutionary ideas from a Black lesbian without letting them turn in onto themselves. And I don't think, I hate to say it, but our movement has not figured out a way to turn in on... We know how to eat others alive. We know how to have a piranha complex. We have a golden child complex. We have a credential complex. And I know some would hate for me to say all of this, but the truth of the matter is that the reason why we have not achieved culture is because culture requires character, not credentials.
Culture requires custom. When we consider custom, then we're not worried about being costumed.
Culture requires nourishment, not just food.
Culture at its best has a language. But language is not only about identity. Language is about loving one another to find the identified. And then calling them in when they don't identify. We haven't done that work.
And these sound like really great abstracts, but I can guarantee you, for those folk who have sat with me in congregational experience, in full circles of trying to figure out not only just anti-racism work, but decolonizing their experience, getting back into real practices regarding what humanism before we had modern science looks like.
We had relationship. We had care. We had understanding before we had degrees. We had shared experience. They look like hugs. They look like kisses. They look like rubbing of noses. We had intimacy. Long talks and watching the sun and maybe just sometimes, "I'm going to go get this for you and come back and bring you something." That's not modern science.
What I learned in Reggio Emilia years ago, I got my certificate in Reggio Emilia as an educator. I'll never forget when I was at a conference and the founder at the time, she was talking and made it very clear, said, "What I find interesting about Western culture is that we label everything that we do as if it is some rich experience, and we forget our most natural, instinctual response."
Puritan culture wants you to be silent when you should maybe probably be shouting. Puritan culture wants you to not dance when it's probably the best thing for you to do. You might need the little pep in your step. Some people say it like this, "I have to laugh to keep from crying." Because if we cry, we make people uncomfortable, so we laugh. But we're in pain.
When we engage with cultural humanism, it holds a different place. It asks the person to live into the fullness of their becoming, not their belonging. I didn't come to humanism because I belong. I came to humanism because I like to become.
And so I'm so rooted in the evolutionary practice that what makes my presence revolutionary is that I will engage it even if you have a hard time accepting me or not. That's the tough part about doing this work. I don't need to fulfill your definitions. I do not need to fulfill any postures of white Western liberal pedigree, and how many books I've produced, how many articles I've done.
Those are nice. But your best opportunity with me is to experience me. I'm an experience. I'm not a textbook. You press the button, let's go for a ride. We can be wonderfully lost. We can be beautifully lost in actually having a love for knowledge. That's good philosophy. That's good culture.
And I think that's something that we have to consider as we continue to do this work. How do we hold our most instinctual self, our most intimate self, our ways of also becoming, so that we are not just trying to fit, "Oh my God, I read this thing and it feels like it's me."
When I read Humanism, it didn't look like me at all. When I read Ethical Culture, it didn't look like me at all. There was not one person that I could reference that I said, "Oh yeah." And we got some incredible humanists, don't get me wrong, we got some incredible Black humanists. I don't knock nobody, but I'm sure they would probably agree with me a lot.
There was not one that looked at any of those things and said, we had to translate. We had to sit back, understand what it was about, and then make room for ourselves. And if we couldn't do that, we would do Shirley Chisholm, pull up a folding chair. 'Cause if you don't want me at the table, then I'ma get there one way or another. So here's my folding chair.
And much of that practice is what people of the global majority have to do within humanism. So I say just get prepared to make way, because we done. The gentrification of our knowledge as a global majority with humanism is very much so done. We will not be labeling things and using Greek and Latin to describe how we do what we do.
We will not be using the same definitions, in the words of Anthony Pinn, he would say, "White social definition," to describe our liberation. My liberation just happened on June 19th.
I can't say that about all my other humanists. And even if they are progressive enough to understand that June 19th is actually a perfect day to talk about liberation and independence, truth be told, the humanism that was birthed did not consider it until it was evident that it was there. I'm not gonna wait on nobody else's evidence to make sure I exist, nor my freedoms, nor my beauty, nor the way that I move.
I will not wait on somebody's evidence to declare my humanism as humanism. I won't.
So at the end of the day, truth be told, what you get from me is an embodied scholar. An artist. Before I'm a minister, I'm an artist. And I'm an artist who moves through the world like a scholar, but I always do my me-search because I know how I want to show up in the world.
And what you get from me, you will never have to guess. You can ask as many questions as you want. Curiosity is holy. It is a humanist trait. If we didn't ask, we would end up in cultural competency.
So I always encourage people to courageously ask, fearlessly ask questions, embolden yourself to ask questions, because we, global majority, are done with you making cultural competency as a framework. So I introduce you to cultural humility, and tell you to ask questions. Humble yourself and ask questions. Because at the end of the day, what you think you know is not what you know. It's what you wanna know about the person or the experience that you are having. So ask.
That's the best offering you can get by developing cultural humanism.
SHAY:
Damn.
For the people that have been, whether it's from the shit that they're constantly going through or just because they haven't thought enough to do me-search, how does that work start? What are the questions that you're asking, or am I oversimplifying it?
JE':
No. I can see you doing a formula in your head.
SHAY:
Yeah.
JE':
You're trying to get the formula correct, and that's a beautiful thing 'cause you're figuring out your own... I'll use this fancy little word that I used to write in my dissertation called epistemology.
SHAY:
Ooh, teach me words. Yes.
JE':
Okay. Epistemology. Come on, now. Epistemology, for a Western lens, has often been a way of knowing, how we arrange our thought and our understanding, how we come to the knowing, right? So it is a way of knowing.
I'd like to bring in, though, the framework of Dr. Mama Etiti Harry. She is a scholar at the Interdenominational Theological School in Atlanta. And she says something I love really beautifully, which I think helps our tradition a lot. She says, "Epistemology is not a way of knowing. It is the worth of knowing."
She proceeds to give us a small example, and I'll answer your question with this. A child when going into grade school is taught their alphabet. When they are taught their alphabet, they are expected to know oftentimes the letters. That is a way of knowing, right? Just to know the letters.
The worth of knowing, however, is the sound. It's not the letters, because the sound, the worth of knowing, to get to a place where we move from way to worth requires investment. So if you invest out of a way, there's a way that you can have a savings account, or you can invest and have a CD, right? So let's invest so we can move into a worth, a framework of worth, value.
Once we do that, we end up exploring, the grade school example, the sounds to teach us now to read. It doesn't matter what letters you know. What matters is what it sounds like so that you can read. As a result, we see a transformation happen because someone understands the worth of the sound. And so every time they're articulating, they are speaking and enunciating and pronouncing words that they now can actually feel and give volume to.
So epistemology, as you were pushing through this arrangement in your head, to go to your question, welcome to neurodivergency. We can handle all the things, right?
SHAY:
I love it.
JE':
Baby, we're not always neurodivergently friendly. I can tell you that now. But that's a whole other...
SHAY:
Squirrel.
JE':
But what my sibling here is asking specifically is, how does one do this me-search, and what do they need to know about themselves as they do it in order for them to show up in the world, or offer a worldview, or participate in it, without, in some cases in our liberal pedigree culture, without tokenizing people?
What does it mean for me to show up? It can sound simple, but we need to think about what are the mechanisms there. I'm gonna keep it this short for most of us. The reason why we have a hard time doing me-search as a community is because we don't wanna engage vulnerability.
This goes back to that relationship dynamic. This goes back not only to the relationship dynamic, but how we understand love and service and we're not in a relationship with.
Vulnerability, really short and quick, is when insecurity and courageousness meet. Vulnerability is simply just that. The insecurity and courageousness meet. Because the courageousness gives you enough to show up, and the insecurity allows for you to find the glorious goofball that you are, to actually maybe just say, "Here is all of me."
All of me. All. The one that is full of awe and wonder. The one that is also probably losing my mind and at the same time trying to love my life. That is what all is. It is the awe, the moment you lose yourself, as well as the moment you gotta love yourself. You gotta love all the things.
We don't have spaces oftentimes where we can love all the things we are. And then when people decide to talk about us or say something about us, Nikki Giovanni says it best in an excerpt where she writes in her poem Nikki-Rosa. She says, "I really hope that no white person has cause to write about me, for they will never know how truly happy I was."
In that poem, she dissects various troubles and maybe challenges that others can never imagine about her life. But she makes it very clear that, "I really hope that no white person has cause to write about me, for they will never know how happy I truly was."
So when it comes down to doing me-search, you have to be vulnerable. You have to want to hold vulnerability at the table, and have two chairs with insecurity and courageousness. And you've got to be able to say, "This is all I am serving. I hope it is in awe. I hope you love it." And I can guarantee you, you might lose it too, but it's all there. I have nothing to hide. You simply don't have to guess, as I said earlier.
SHAY:
What you're saying is landing for me as to why I've felt so disconnected from myself, I think, especially in these recent years. Because I grew up as someone who witnessed my mother approaching any and everyone, asking about the guy behind the deli counter, "How's your wife doing?" Asking the guy that's washing the dishes, "How are your kids doing? Oh, I know that they just had a birthday. How did it go?" She knew all of this, and so I've been raised to have zero fear when approaching people, when making friends, when having those moments that make life magical with other people.
But where I've felt stunted is also in my belief that their beliefs are fucked up and harmful to other people.
JE':
Yes.
SHAY:
And I don't want shit to do with that person anymore.
JE':
Yep.
SHAY:
And cutting it off, and then creating these filters around where I meet new people, hoping, oh, I hope that they don't believe anything that I'm gonna disagree with or that is gonna cause harm to the people that I love and care about, because I won't want their energy in my life. But then I lose the opportunities to have those moments that made the magic. And it's been making me feel empty at times.
JE':
I'm glad you brought this up. We have lived in so much of cancel culture that...
Cancel culture is...
I'm gonna be bold enough to say it. I'll say it. Cancel culture is actually white supremacy culture.
SHAY:
Oh.
JE':
It is an erasure. The problem with cancel culture is that it is actually very much so entrenched in it, and we are not careful about it, because cancel culture does not actually engage consequence.
Cancel culture says, "You don't exist. I don't have to worry about you." This is how we ended up with what we're ending up with right now with this administration. We didn't think about those people we had to sit with at our Thanksgiving table 'cause they were canceled.
See, when you have consequential culture, you hold people to the fire. You got to sit with Bubba and them. You got to sit with Aunt Clara and them, who didn't like your friends and knew that they didn't like your gay friend and they didn't like your Black friend. But you don't wanna sit with them, so they're canceled.
When you have consequence, you have to hold them to the fire. You will visit them out of resistance, and have a conversation with them out of resistance, and experience the heartache out of resistance, and experience the harm of a family that you are connected to within your bloodline that you inherited.
Because at the end of the day, when we think about it, we think that erasing folk in a society is gonna make them do better. Baby, you got to hold people to consequence, because good consequence comes with correction and conviction.
And that is the problem with most of us today. We do not wanna offer correction and conviction, and we do not wanna hold them to a level in which they have to face, every time that they see you, that they know what they think, what they practice, how they live, how they be, how they believe, will actually have to be transformed.
If your presence doesn't bring transformation, then yeah, you're gonna cancel them. Because at the end of the day, when I show up in a room of white people, trust me, I got a lot of shit to say. But I can guarantee you they stay with me because I'm going to hold you in a consequence filled with love. That love is basically rooted in a lot of correction.
Love is a correcting element. It is a convicting element, and it is a transformational element. And I will love some white folk to a fault. Lost my job for loving white folk and telling them some hard truths. Because at the end of the day, what matters is that they want to change. And do not invite me anywhere where you do not want to change.
I will see you in your Trump, Republican, conservative, Christian extremist behavior and sit right in front of you as the humanist, culturally Pentecostal, shake-you-down, intellectual, Black, queer self with a high heel on, ready to ride it in your neck.
We think that being ethical in this world means being polite and being conflict avoidant. Consequence always has confrontation. I'm not gonna back down if you are a blood relative. And I can tell you right now, even in my own home, I got some folk that say some real ignorant BS. Not liking queer folk, not understanding, willing to take certain family members to go meet with their pastor to talk about how they need not be gay, and teaching old narratives that don't even make sense when homosexuality was not even a word that existed until 1945 in the Bible.
And I'm sitting here listening, and I can tell you I would rather for them to stay clear of me where I don't have to cancel them. Most of my family, if they have to, they'll stay clear of me because they already know what I stand for. If they want to not be canceled, they'll just deal with me in consequence.
You know what's gonna happen if you're in front of Je'. So get prepared.
SHAY:
Yeah, that's right. Have the conversation. Prep everybody at the family reunion. Prep everybody at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Prep everybody for the Easter service. I'm not gonna be impressed by how we talk about how Jesus got up good on good morning, you still acting like hot hell. I don't wanna hear you talk about divinity if we can't talk about how Black trans women can be divinity too.
JE':
The beautiful thing about folk like myself who don't have to prescribe to any kind of tradition, if it can be written by a brilliant UU minister who wrote, first name is Williams, but he writes a book that says God is a white racist, does a real beautiful theological research on it. If I can have an author write that, and then have Dr. James Cone write that God is a God of the oppressed, where he loves those who are on the oppressed side of things, and then assert that God is Black ontologically, and then go as far as to say that God is queer, and we get to, and theologians get to do this, I'm waiting for the day where we actually talk about house ball and humanism. And how we can talk about being more embodied, and how we can actually begin to look at how some folk, like yourself, you mentioned earlier, you feel like when you deal with yourself that you split up into pieces.
It's because we live in a world that does not believe in intersectionality that well, let alone interdisciplinary. And heaven forbid, might I just push a little further and say, we are not allowed to be transdisciplinary, where we just flow into ways of becoming and being and showing up in ways that we didn't realize were there until we got into the space and then came back down and then said, "Oh, wow, that was different."
And we don't get to challenge ourselves. We need to be able to fit the role, the rules, and the responsibility.
My hope, my real hope in society, is that we actually begin to not just live in roles, rules, and responsibilities, but we actually begin to live with purpose. Instead of sitting back and thinking that we always have to be productive, right? 'Cause that's what happens. People think, "Oh, I gotta do these roles so I can be productive."
I wanna change production into purpose. I wanna take what white people understand as privilege, and I wanna just get them into a posture. Know their position. Know where they need to be. I don't wanna hear any more about, "Oh, I'm privileged." Baby, get in posture. What is your position? Because you're taking up too much time and space.
Any element of empire first takes on time and space. Don't believe me? When Rome came and decided to actually take over parts of Judea, they messed with time and space. They occupy time and space.
Humanism has the ability, actually, to help us restore what people understand, how to reclaim their time. Just give us back our goddamn humanity. Give us back the cultures that we know. I don't need to be like you to love you. I don't need to think like you in order to be transformed into something anew.
Kara Walker, the artist, says, "We are made new by our transcendence." Humanism, where is your trajectory? I know your tradition. I know your Hegels. I know your Heideggers. I know your Platos. I know your Socrates. I know your Greek gods and more. But do you know mine?
Do you know mine? Because at the end of the day, the humanism that we have doesn't only have a good tradition. It doesn't just need to have transformation. It needs to have a trajectory. We've got to be at the table. And if you don't want them there, get them a goddamn folding chair.
'Cause I can tell you right now, folk who have had their language gentrified, who have had their philosophies gentrified and remixed and turned into humanist practice, it has happened. We've done it. We've taken some folk and called them humanists and they have never named themselves as humanists.
But we'll do it. And I know this is probably hard for this broadcast, but I gotta be honest. We gotta be mindful of how we claim folk that have not named themselves as that. We need to honor how we expand our dialogue, how we expand our umbrella, our conscience around humanism.
Can it be embodied? Can it be spirited? Can it be free thinking? Because at the end of the day, if we're really gonna do this work, you gotta have a trajectory, and you cannot do this work alone just because somebody fits what makes you feel comfortable. Some of us do actually like being at the fire. This Scorpio is one of them.
SHAY:
Ah. Will you please come back on the podcast?
JE':
Yes. Glad to.
SHAY:
The way that I have recalibrated today. When I tell you everything about you is so nutritious, and yet I also feel like I wanna sop you up with a biscuit. You are everything. Oh my God.
Reverend Je', thank you so much for starting off my week. By the way, I think it's Octavia Butler's birthday today.
JE':
I believe so. Yes, it is. It is. Let's look. I think it is Octavia Butler. I do. I really... Let's see. Octavia Butler. Yes, indeed.
SHAY:
Oh my goodness.
JE':
Come on. Come on, future. Come on, humanism. That's my life. My life. I do this. I do this 'cause look, I love myself to do this. I dare to love myself to do this.
SHAY:
Oh. I'm in awe. I don't have any words. I'm gonna have to dance around my apartment now.
JE':
Do all the things, honey.
SHAY:
I will absolutely do all of the things.
Thank you so much.
JE':
You're welcome.
SHAY:
I have nothing poignant to say. I'm just stunned.
JE':
To be continued.
SHAY:
To be continued.
JE':
This is a wonderful and refreshing podcast. I will say that. If I can say anything, transform every moment of what people understand in their worldview. We need more reimagining. If it's the podcast, then start there. But you yourself are also an experience, and no one should ever have to miss out on that.
SHAY:
Oh, the crime of virtual. I just wish that I could hug you so badly right now.
JE':
Me too. Me too.
SHAY:
We'll cross paths.
JE':
Yeah. We're gonna. Thank you so much.
SHAY:
Yeah. We will. Thank you.