By J. Alfred Smith, Sr.

Many more young people listen to rappers than preachers!

Rapper T-Pain says white people should stop celebrating Black History Month.

“You are separating us again,” he says or words to that effect. “We want to be part of history, not just one month.”

Kanye West is trying to do what a gang of white supremacists and anti-critical race theorists have wanted to do for years: cancel Black History Month. West’s mother was part of Jesse Jackson’s Operation P.U.S.H. and his father was a member of the Black Panther Party. West says his daughter would not have known that she is Black had it not been for a class that taught her about Martin Luther King Jr.

West has a rap lyric called “I Am Not Black, I’m Kanye.”

Dr. Cornell West, Ph.D, a Union Theological Seminary professor with strong ties to the Shiloh Baptist Church in Sacramento and who has a large inter-generational, multiracial and multicultural following, gave a truthful and loving response to Kanye.

Approaching Rapper Kanye West on what they shared in common, Brother Cornel gave him highest praise for the powerful lyrics on Jesus Walks:

“Order, huh.
Yo, we at war.
We at war with terrorism, racism.
But most of all, we at war with ourselves.
God show me the way because the devil tryna break me down.
Jesus walks with me, with me, with me”

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Brother Cornel then defined the three-dimensional nature of history as past, present and future and suggested that instead of eliminating Black History Month we should rename February as Black Future Month.

Cornel West is challenging us to take the rich legacy bequeathed to us by our predecessors into the right now with a vision for a future for generations following!

Let us listen to each other and ask each other what needs to be done now to have an abundant future for today’s children, their children and grandchildren.

Could we minimize our differences and build operational unity with our diversity starting now?

Can rappers, preachers, parents, and politicians and each reader and all others who differ agree that yesterday is a cancelled check? Tomorrow is a promissory note?

That today is all the cash we have?

Brother Cornel West had built a relationship with Brother Kanye West before advising him to get rid of his ‘symbolic’crack pipe.

When we build relationships with people, we can speak the naked truth to each other in love which is better than backbiting and criticizing others behind their backs.

Maulana Karenga, chair of Africana Studies at California State University at Long Beach, says Malcolm X understood history as a necessary corrective for the diminished and distorted concept of our identity cultivated by the oppressor through the creation of an artificial entity called “Negro, a non-historical being who has no history and having no history has no culture” and thus separated from their roots understand themselves as a derivative and dependent part of their oppressor.

I ask the reader to ponder each perspective of Maulana Karenga as was given to the ethical and moral reflections of Cornel West.

This will require rereading and meditation in your quest for corrective action of personal character and collective social justice action to free the masses from oppression so they may live lives of dignity and decency in the eyes of God.

Last, but by no means least, we must challenge people to honor mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters, little girls and women in general by addressing derogatory word use and general disrespect of women.

Violent and misogynist lyrics are unacceptable.

J. Alfred Smith, Sr. is pastor emeritus of Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church.

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