In and Through Our Black Men

In the last issue, I told you about how my son’s employer continues to monitor his calls and give him low scores based on his ‘tone’. Though he has no customer complaints and he effectively handles each call, their only point of contention is his ‘tone’. Their complaint is that his voice has no distinctive quality. But having worked in a call center for close to a decade, managing multi-million dollar portfolios and overseeing upward of 50+ direct reports; I had never heard of such a thing. So where is this coming from?

I don’t want to believe that his white Supervisor is being racist and neither do I want to assume the other black Supervisor is merely regurgitating what her white or Latino counterparts are spewing. So what is this? The black conspiracist in me sees this from one perspective. Since my son is a wrongfully, convicted felon, ‘they’ are using this as an opportunity to degrade him. Because ‘they’ know employment opportunities are limited to felons, 'they’re' using this to experiment on him while trying to force him to quit because 'they' want to make him question his manhood and think seriously about changing what can’t be changed and that’s his tone. Because it’s not like ‘he’s up in there talkin’ ‘bout – you know what I’m sayin’ on every call; they’re complaining because he’s not as ‘upbeat’ as they’d like for him to be. And how can they expect him to be like Carlton (from the Fresh Prince) when three to four times a week, the very company that demands upbeat-ness, beats on their employees to get it? Then there’s the colorless child of God in me that knows there’s more to this than tone. That it’s not just about police profiling and shootings, but that black men are literally prey and that something devilish is behind this. That if I look too hard at skin color or pay too much attention to the noise behind the complaints or racial disparities, I could be distracted by the REAL ISSUE which is Someone’s coming. What do I mean by that?

Historically, when you look in the Bible, you always find those in power ordering the death of boys in an effort to thwart a takeover. In Exodus 1:9, 10, 15, 16 we find the king of Egypt saying, ‘Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come, let us deal shrewdly with them.’ He even went so far as to tell the midwives to kill their sons; of which, should have included Moses; the one who would later go on to deliver millions of Hebrews from Egyptian bondage. Another instance can be found in Matthew 2:16; when Herod the king gave the order ‘to put to death all the male children’ because he was troubled about the birth of Jesus. As I stated Someone’s coming. Someone’s coming that has people of power in an uproar. Could it be that our sons will part the Red Seas of racial indifference and bridge the gap between justice and injustice? Could it finally be time for the black male to live the life Jesus died for them to have? There’s something in our sons that have made them a target and that something is in fact SOMEONE and He’s coming soon…in and through our babies.

Pray this with me: Heavenly Father, I lift up every black man that I know and I thank You for their lives. You said that You use and choose the ‘base things of the world and the things which are despised’ to ‘bring to nothing the things that are’. (1 Cor 1:28) I thank You for using every black man in my life to do just that. In Jesus’ name.

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