[00:00:00] This is a Dauntless Media Collective Podcast.
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[00:00:07] Hey, hey now, we're back.
[00:00:11] The second half of profane faith is right on you now.
[00:00:16] Come on.
[00:00:17] ["Pomp and Circumstance"]
[00:00:25] We have enemies within our country. sections of the sacred secular and profane define God. And look, we won't be trying to answer difficult questions. Rather, we'll be engaging them and asking better ones regarding faith, race, gender and religion. I'll be your host, Daniel Whitehodge.
[00:01:44] Hey, fam. Hey, fam. How we doing? How we doing? kind of central body configuration, if you will. So yes, I have come to really appreciate, you know, what seasons represent and just the changing, the changing and just going is got me thinking a lot. And I'd be interested to hear back from y'all. Those of you who listen on a consistent basis, those of you maybe just tuning in now, subscribing now, which is great. I always welcome new listeners, you know, but you know, this is, I've been going since 2017,
[00:04:21] August of 2017, that was I used to tell a lot of organizations, I don't get invited back to anything nowadays, but I used to tell a lot of organizations, like maybe it's just time for this organization just to die, to be burned down and then to reconstruct it
[00:05:40] in a different mode, I don't know.
[00:05:43] I've shared before just kind of the struggles
[00:05:45] of just trying to figure out like, okay, so what's next? Has it run its course? Or has it just, are we just button up against a new season? And I don't know. I'm the producer, the host, the editor.
[00:07:00] I do my own hosting, so there is no other input.
[00:07:05] So yeah, if you got some thoughts and ideas, by all means, go what do we do next and does something come up out of this you know and I've been on other podcast shows before where you know it just it just naturally ended I did one with my good friend jr. four staros and Kate Sanchez when the American gods television series was on called oh my Wednesday and I love
[00:08:20] recording that I loved watching the the show I've made my point Gossa just don't want to be a blabbering talking head either That's that's the other thing because there are a ton of POC center podcasts Now when I was first started in 2017 there were a handful and now there are like a hundred handfuls Which is great. This is great. I think podcasting is a great medium a great platform to get ideas out on
[00:09:47] We're not a big How do all those spaces come together? How do black humanism, transhumanism come together and really engage with where we're at right now? Because I do know and believe we are at a precipice in time. In that switch or that next season, if you will,
[00:11:06] for humanity I think ising to you? Am I really teaching someone or am I um, you know, mainly kind of like, well, one, it's money. It's that's the other part of it. Right? It's it's money to get to these conferences. Um, and then what is the, what is the payout for a AR for me? It's still a good payout, meaning that I, I make good connections. I network as those who've been listening to
[00:13:41] your, you know, I bring up a AR a lot just a community for you. I think we can all begin to, at least those of you who listen to this show begin to see some of those things pan out. And right, this is kind of the cornerstone of religion, right? It brings meaning, it brings validity
[00:15:01] to an ideological structure, a worldview, if you will.
[00:15:05] And we're seeing that those cornerstones was elected president. I began, it really began to usher in where we find ourselves and now. Hate crimes spiked within the first three months of Obama's against black people when Obama was elected in 2008. And from that right, we have the Tea Party, from that we have, you know,
[00:16:20] even Sarah Palin though,
[00:16:21] if you think about just where she was at,
[00:16:23] people thought she was crazy.
[00:16:24] And now that type of ideological structure is accepted.
[00:16:27] It's in Congress, caught up in the love of ideas. I think those just like Naomi Klein has said, when people fall in love with ideas, when
[00:17:42] people fall in love with theories and ideologies, you know, I'm, you know, I'll be the first one to call out white supremacy. But I'll also use the first one to call out like, Hey, hey, hey, I think we're, I think we're, we're leaning too much towards fundamentalism, even if it sounds good, right? Fundamentalism on the left just sounds good. And yeah, I don't want to lean that way.
[00:19:01] So without any further ado,
[00:19:04] these are just my thoughts as of now
[00:19:07] and where we find ourselves.
[00:20:06] And what does life look like in a world where we're not really sure what to tell apart from fact and fiction
[00:20:09] Make sense. Oh my gosh
[00:20:16] All right. Well, let me introduce my guests cuz they have an amazing story. They have me on their
[00:20:21] Podcast not too long ago, which I'll talk about here in a second
[00:20:25] And I wanted to have them on the on the podcast. This is a to me
[00:20:28] Spencer helm she they inspire people in her community and be on. Tamiz lives in Richmond with their spouse, Elison, her daughter, Harlem, and their puppy, Beacon Ray. In her spare time, she loves to dissect and listen to hip hop, which unfortunately we didn't get you as a talk, get even, get into, because there was so much else to cover, but we gonna get to that at some point,
[00:21:41] because I'm gonna have Tamiz back on.
[00:21:43] Watch documentaries, whiskey tasting, all right now, This is great to finally have you on Good, it's good to be here. I'm really really honored. So I appreciate you having me. Oh, no shoot I when you reach dad eyes is like oh shoot Yeah, I'll go on your show if I can come back on yours It's all you can come on mine. So this is great Well, let me ask you the question that I ask everybody and that is what has been happening for you from birth to now
[00:23:02] What's been going on for you? Yeah? I mean I think I grew up
[00:24:02] you just want the target off your bat. Right. Right.
[00:24:02] That's what I did.
[00:24:03] Did that up until Trayvon, up until 2021.
[00:24:07] Wow.
[00:24:08] All right. 2012, I'm sorry.
[00:24:10] And so I think since then,
[00:24:14] since that point in my life,
[00:24:15] it was kind of a period where I was just kind of unraveling,
[00:24:19] but also kind of what I call unleavening,
[00:24:21] which was like, you know,
[00:24:22] extracting that whiteness and stuff out of the way
[00:24:25] that I thought about God and myself and scripture. that you when you say that that's not for me anymore I'd be curious how how you impact that and what that looks like because I'll say this real quick I want you to get it on it oftentimes the the conversation around deconstruction tends to be very white yeah so break that we make that down for us a little bit
[00:25:40] I think the best part of it, you know, the forms of deity, how I'd love to hear how you
[00:27:01] construct it or not, or not, you know, I'm saying, I mean, I'm not putting I'm not trying to put
[00:27:04] words in your mouth. I just I'm just curious. so to me, I'm kind of like, that's the vein I'm kind of walking in. In the same way, like, I feel like Jesus definitely led me to this place of like introducing me to the spirit,
[00:28:20] right?
[00:28:21] And the spirit has guided me into truth.
[00:28:23] And I'm appreciative of that, but if you're in some of those conversations, you know, about, you know, the proximity of what you what you have or who you engage with and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely like building it as I go, right? I think. And so that's what I mean. Like, I feel like really Jesus led trying to harm or hurt. I'm with it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's, that's powerful. I think that's very freeing for, for a lot of us, I think that we're raised really in evangelicalism that is very set in its
[00:31:00] ways. That's very, very much, you know, prescribed.
[00:31:05] And I think there's more of us, when I needed God and I put a lot of distance between them because they were gonna be my downfall.
[00:32:21] They were gonna cause me to have a slippery slope
[00:32:23] and be a pos state.
[00:32:24] And so when I left everything in 2012,
[00:32:28] they were just right there. the class he's in. And so he was like, what, what, what, what tell me about the King James version, brother? So you know, we broke that down. And just again, just kind of how those those cycles have, have continued to stay, stay in, particularly, you know, the African American community. Yeah. Um, all right. So tell me about this book debut book, Faith
[00:33:40] and Levin, the wilderness. I love the subtitle, the wilderness
[00:33:44] between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. That was just released able to, you know, where they have voodoo in Louisiana. So that's why things happen to them or, you know, Obama might be Muslim and that person's kind of like, wait a minute, but that was some of the rhetoric. So around Obama's second term, and then when Trayvon died, it was the first time I realized like, wait a minute, y'all, like this something is wrong here, like, because I was actually in a context, a charismatic context at that time,
[00:35:03] that talked a lot about hearing the heart beat of God and being friends with God and all that needed to die for people to wake up, I was just in a different place. And that was kind of an indicator to me. And I kind of wrote that story to kind of demonstrate what happened between, you know, in that 10 years between the two murders. Yeah, I, yeah, that's deep. That's deep. I think,
[00:36:21] yeah, definitely Trayvon. I would say for me kind the media. And one of the things, one of the classes I teach is a media literacy class. And I'm always surprised at this younger generation, they may have come up in this technology area, but they don't necessarily understand or even know and to be able to decipher, right?
[00:37:41] The literacy skills it takes to decipher some things.
[00:37:43] And I'm an old head, right?
[00:37:44] Like I tapped out like, But like I'm beyond, by the time, I mean, if at this point, you're still asking questions about systemic stuff and whiteness and white supremacy and privilege, I'm kind of like, I'm the wrong one. I'm not the one, not after all of this time. So I mean, in one way, the way I'm navigating the Trump era is by living like my Black life matters,
[00:39:03] and I'm not having conversations that are not paid by white people with white people. what clans, you know, all those types of things, like you got people, you have history, and it might be problematic, but then you can do some of that ancestry work and kind of like cut that stuff off or, you know, repent of it or whatever word you want to use. Like, I'm okay to do that right now, but in 2023, we are not still having conversations about, we not having conversation
[00:40:20] about whether women can preach, we not having conversations about whether you can be queer
[00:40:24] Christian, we not having conversations about whether or not white supremacy exists in our nation. Like, But you're saying there's more forward mobility outside of this religion for a woman and there is inside of this religion Those two things don't make sense one of these things is not like the other if there's or even thinking about Obama back in the day When they were talking about like Obama's the anti-Christ stuff. It's like okay Forward mobility for black people is anti-Christy y'all like make it make sense
[00:41:42] You so a lot to be an errand to be authoritative? Like, you don't need that. Like, and if you do, then that's something about your own faith, not mine. You know, so I think that those are the things that start showing up for me, that has started showing up for me that where now, there's just like this newfound confidence, not to be arrogant, not to be an asshole,
[00:44:20] but just to say, you know, like, I'm not doing fear.
[00:44:23] I will not embrace the thing that y'all say
[00:44:25] your religion is supposed to my church. Just come to my church because we don't do it that way. Like somehow that version of Christianity doesn't exist. Right? It's so true. It's very much like, you know, when they put stuff out, like, you know, we welcome everybody.
[00:45:41] And I saw this TikTok the other day
[00:45:43] where the guy was like, just tell me
[00:45:45] whether or not you'll marry me and my spouse.
[00:45:47] Just tell me whether or not I can serve on leadership. to see what somebody thinks in regards to just life and society. Ask them about Palestine and their views on sex workers. Um, and I was like, wow, okay, you know, so human sexuality seems to trip a lot of people up. And when I mean a lot of people, I'm not necessarily just talking about white folks in general. I'm talking about us black folks. Right. And it's like, we can talk all these things about raising the white man and
[00:47:03] this and this and that.
[00:47:04] But when it comes to human sexuality, then we go very binary.
[00:48:06] The Wayne Wade, whose son is now legally had his birth certificate changed. He's legally a girl. Yeah
[00:48:12] Hormone therapy when he gets 30 years old and looks in the mirror and says you know what? I
[00:48:18] Don't like living like this for me. I want to go back to being what God made me a man I want to get a wife and I want to have children. We only got one problem. Don't we your reproductive is gone?
[00:49:25] to ask him about whether he ate hot Cheetos because there's all kinds of things that are getting in the way of the survival of the Black community.
[00:49:28] I don't think it would just be overly processed food.
[00:49:30] So it's like, let's not pretend that this is a universal thing.
[00:49:34] This is really based in some homophobia and some hatred.
[00:49:40] Let's just be clear about that because I want to run through and see if you are imbibing
[00:49:44] anything else that could get in the midst of that conversation, he wasn't even using her pronouns. So it's kind of like, yo, like you don't even, you're not even demonstrating respect for the African community in this conversation. So I think that's number one for me, like, okay, you can have your opinion, but let's not, let's not make this about African survival. That's all you eat is vegan food and drink water.
[00:51:02] Right?
[00:51:03] Like, come on now.
[00:51:05] Yeah.
[00:51:06] Yeah. I think a lot of times
[00:52:22] black people hide behind blackness but they don't deal with the other stuff so
[00:52:26] like a lot of times white feminists aren't, it doesn't make any sense to me. It's not grounded in anything, especially when you think of two spirit people, you think of indigenous people that like almost honored folks who were trans because they represented two different realms at the same
[00:53:41] time. There was an honor given to that. And it wasn't an expectation that the whole society I don't want to make a generalized statement, but I think when I look at the black community, being present to feeling and like being present in a space is really difficult. Trauma in our body, it's trauma in our memory, but being having a really decent conversation about this is really hard to do unless you're,
[00:55:01] it's really hard to remove binary unless you're embodied.
[00:55:04] And I think a lot of the situations,
[00:55:06] if you think about folks who have learned to be embodied. Now, I think that that's something we wrestle, especially black men, of course, right? Like their bodies are under assault, their bodies are not saved. So I don't want to make light of that, but I think there's a relative amounts of like embodiment and incarnation that we can gain as we have these conversations that we're not,
[00:56:20] we're not able to have them
[00:56:21] unless some of that stuff has been dealt with.
[00:56:24] That's kind of my thought.
[00:56:25] Ooh, I love it.
[00:56:26] That is a beautiful thought. along the way in these experiences I've accumulated wisdom, because I've just lived and tried to learn that bringing myself back into the equation, bringing myself to the table of decisions and spirituality has been a game changer. I think for so long, I was an empty shell doing what people on stage just told me to do. And now it's kind of like I love doing stuff like that. The book is on Amazon, it's called Faith Unlevance, the wilderness between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. And then I have a podcast called Life After 11, which the honorable Dr. Haas was on. And that's where we just discussed like how we're starting to find treasure and what the church always told us was trash
[00:59:01] and what does it mean to get told to stay away from
[00:59:04] and not talk to.
[00:59:06] Because again, I think that being present for a season and she endures perhaps being smacked one night and then she seeks help from the church. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain. By the time we're done you either get on the bus or you get run over by the bus. Those are the options. There's nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law and I am tired of communities of faith
