The Playbook Hasn’t Changed—So Change Your Strategy

Oppressors don’t invent new rules; they recycle the same playbook that brought them to the dance. When I played team sports, every team had the same rulebook—but each team built its own playbook, adjusting the scheme to neutralize an opponent’s strengths. The rules didn’t change; the strategy did.

That’s what we’re facing now. When tragedy strikes, we’re told to be “empathetic” so long as it’s palatable to certain groups. We’re told to pray and send “good vibes” as long as our prayers don’t disturb anyone’s comfort. In this nation, even “human decency” often comes with conditions.

Pastor Kristian A. Smith once said he doesn’t just want Christians to be more biblically literate—he wants us to be better people. That lands hard because so many of us think we already know what Jesus wants from us in the face of the evil we’re witnessing. But if we’re honest, we’ve been off base.

Take Jesus’ teaching: “Do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”(Matthew 5:39). We’ve preached passivity from that line, as if surrender somehow convicts the aggressor. Naw, bro—context is everything.

In the world Jesus was addressing, folks touched others with the right hand; the left was reserved for unclean tasks. A strike to the right cheek meant a backhand—a gesture of domination used on someone deemed beneath you. In some legal discussions of that era, a backhanded blow carried a heavier penalty because it was the ultimate public insult to one’s dignity.

Jesus wasn’t telling people to accept humiliation. Turning the left cheek forces a decision: the aggressor must either back down or strike with the open palm—the way you would strike an equal. That move is not cowardice; it’s moral jiu-jitsu. It rejects shame, exposes the hierarchy, and declares, “My honor doesn’t come from you; it comes from God.”

Imagine if we lived like human dignity actually had greater value than optics. Imagine a world where humiliation had a cost. But in the old playbook, domination is the point—silence, submission, and stillness are the goals.

I refuse to be timid in a world that misuses my faith to keep me docile. Christ did not call me to be humiliated in the name of “progress.” The same Jesus who taught cheek-turning as resistance also flipped tables in a rigged economy (Mark 11:15–17; John 2:13–17). That wasn’t a tantrum; it was a targeted act to restore the dignity of those being exploited.

So miss me with cheap grace that baptizes compromise. Don’t just say, “It’s okay, you’ll be better.” Stop it. Don’t only pray about a situation; pray that God makes you an answer to that prayer (James 2:17). God has not called you to passivity. God has called you to move the needle, expose the plan, and adjust your strategy.

The playbook of oppression hasn’t changed:

  • Shame to shrink you.
  • Silence to isolate you.
  • Spiritual gaslighting to domesticate you.

So change your strategy:

  • Name the insult and stand in God-given dignity (Genesis 1:26–27).
  • Refuse the shame and demand equal treatment (Matthew 5:39).
  • Disrupt exploitative tables and rebuild just ones (Mark 11:15–17; Isaiah 58).
  • Pray and act—faith with works (James 2:14–18).
  • Organize courageously in beloved community (Acts 2:42–47; Micah 6:8).

The rulebook of the Kingdom hasn’t shifted. But it does require holy adjustments in a hostile arena. So—change your scheme. Reclaim your dignity. Confront the blow. Overturn the table. Win—with conscience, courage, and community—by any means necessary that honor the God who stamped you with glory.

Scripture to meditate on: Matthew 5:38–42; Micah 6:8; Isaiah 58:6–12; Mark 11:15–17; James 2:14–18.

Reflection prompts:

  1. Where have I confused passivity with Christlikeness?
  2. What “table” in my context needs overturning—and what would rebuilding look like?
  3. How can I become part of the answer I’m praying for this week?

Burdened Exceptionalism: Whiteness, Cheap Grace, and the Crooked Family Tree

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” – Galatians 6:7

I am a 44-year-old man living in a world I never thought would exist.

You see, I was raised in the Mount Olivet Baptist Church under the preaching of the late, great Dr. Charles E. Booth. Every Sunday, he gathered the children for “moments with the youth.” He would look us in the eye and ask one question:

“Who are you?”

And our response thundered back:

“We are God’s Children; We are beautiful African American children.”

My entire childhood was inundated with that simple truth — that I was created with pride, with beauty, with God-given uniqueness. I never questioned my importance in this world as a Black boy.

Yet the world has done everything in its power to reduce my existence to talking points and social currency.

The Crooked Family of Empire

This past week has brought things to a head. The murder of children and the peddling of bigotry remind us that evil is no respecter of persons. And it unmasks, in real time, a nation that has sold a false bill of goods for 250 years.

This nation has been built by a crooked family named colonialism and imperialism. That family tree has done everything in its power to maintain the status quo while fooling the shallow and manipulating the philosophically weak. Every time America begins to function like the democracy it claims to be, this family strikes back. And if the movement cannot be stopped, this family will even crucify one of its own to maintain its position.

Caught in the crossfire, most people don’t realize how they are being played. But make no mistake: the crooked family tree is showing its weakness.

As Malcolm X said after the assassination of President Kennedy:

“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”

The truth is simple: what you sow, you will reap. The chickens always come home to roost.

Whiteness: The Offspring of Empire

Philosophers remind us that whiteness is not a color but a construct. Born in the age of exploration, whiteness grew into adolescence through colonial conquest and matured into adulthood under imperialism. It became the global standard for humanity — a false identity tied to domination, conquest, and control.

James Baldwin warned:

“As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

Whiteness distorts truth, breeds ignorance, and baptizes violence in the language of virtue. It is the cousin of empire and the child of colonialism, justifying itself as “civilization” while demanding silence from the oppressed.

As Charles Mills argued in The Racial Contract, whiteness is not only privilege but cultivated ignorance — a refusal to know the truth of oppression. Whiteness does not merely order skin; it orders knowledge, perception, and belonging.

Cheap Grace and the American Lie

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, confronting the evils of Nazi Germany, warned of cheap grace:

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

America has perfected its own version: racial cheap grace.

We see it every time a Black individual is paraded as proof of progress while systems of injustice remain untouched. We see it when diversity is celebrated symbolically but structural inequity is left intact. Cheap grace is the applause of exceptional achievement masking the cries of the marginalized.

King’s Warning About Complicity

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this better than most. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail he confessed:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling-block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

King also wrote:

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

And Audre Lorde, the poet-prophet, echoed this warning:

“My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.”

Silence is not neutral. It is complicity. It is cooperation with the crooked family tree.

Burdened Exceptionalism Syndrome

When I think about being a Black man in this season, I recognize a malaise among those who share my melanin. It is the constant challenge between being honest with ourselves or settling into what the world demands — to become the “magical negro.”

I have come to call this Burdened Exceptionalism Syndrome (BES), also known as Magical Negro Syndrome.

Definition: A sociocultural pattern affecting “exceptional” Black individuals in dominant-culture spaces where their value is contingent on serving others’ redemption or success, leading to self-suppression, chronic over-responsibility, spiritual/emotional exhaustion, and impaired agency.

Context of exposure: regular participation in settings where one is celebrated as “exceptional” while implicitly or explicitly tasked with fixing, soothing, or redeeming others or their institution.

This is the cheap grace of race relations. This is the crooked family tree disguising itself as progress. This is the false hope of whiteness — to elevate the few while erasing the many.

The Symptom Clusters of BES

BES is not abstract. It leaves fingerprints on the body and the soul:

  • Emotional: muted anger, guilt when resting, numbness; cycles of resentment → shame.
  • Cognitive: internalized utility (“I’m valuable when I fix things”), hypervigilance to white comfort, self-doubt about deserving care.
  • Behavioral: chronic over-functioning, boundary collapse, role-triage (pastor/therapist/mediator) without reciprocity.
  • Relational: tokenization, isolation through praise (“different from the rest”), people-pleasing to retain access.
  • Spiritual/Meaning: sanctifying self-erasure; pressure to be the “forgiving/wisdom figure”; moral injury when truth-telling is punished; lament avoided.
  • Somatic: fatigue, sleep disturbance, stress markers (headache, GI issues).

This is the weight of exceptionalism. It is the cost of cheap grace. It is the crooked family tree asking us once more to prop up its rotten branches.

Refusing the Burden

Ladies and gentlemen, I can no longer accept this burden. I cannot keep watching my people contort themselves into symbols of redemption for a nation unwilling to repent.

Angela Davis was right:

“In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

Malcolm was right: the chickens will come home to roost.
King was right: silence will never protect us.
Lorde was right: our silences will not save us.
Bonhoeffer was right: cheap grace cannot save a corrupted church or a corrupted nation.

And I am saying now: BES is not our inheritance.

Our inheritance is freedom, dignity, and the fullness of life promised by Jesus:

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” – John 10:10

The only way forward is truth. Not performance. Not exception. Not silence. But truth.

A Lament

O God of justice,
we stand beneath a crooked family tree,
its roots watered with blood,
its branches heavy with lies,
its fruit poisoned by empire.

We lament the cheap grace that baptizes oppression,
the whiteness that devours truth,
the complicity that silences prophets,
the burden that breaks the backs of the exceptional.

We name the exhaustion of our people,
the muted anger,
the sleepless nights,
the bodies carrying stress as inheritance.

We confess the sins not of the enslaved,
but of the enslavers who were paid in silver,
the moderates who prized order above justice,
the churches that sanctified erasure.

We cry with the psalmist: “How long, O Lord?”
How long will this nation reap what it has sown?
How long will chickens circle overhead before the roost is burned down?
How long will our Blackness be both spectacle and scapegoat?

Let the silence of the saints be judged.
Let the empire’s cheap grace be exposed.
Let the mask of exceptionalism be torn from our faces.

We lament.
We do not soothe.
We do not excuse.
We do not forgive what has not repented.

We weep,
and in our weeping,
we testify:
this burden is not ours to carry.

Mourning a Fruitless Fig Tree

September 10, 2025, will be etched in the minds of many for different reasons, but for me it will be remembered as the day I stood in the unspeakable space of anger and rage. My anger is not only about one event or one death; it is about a world that continues to buy into a false reality woven into the very DNA of the United States. While people debate about whether we should show decency in difficult times, I cannot escape the truth that this nation has always been the cousin of imperialism. For two and a half centuries, America has survived on the backs of those who never deserved violence or death, finding new ways to demean and denigrate those who made this land their home—whether by choice or by force. Violence has always been its default mode, a live-action version of Call of Duty in which human lives become expendable for the sake of power.

The tragedies of recent weeks remind us that the infection is not surface-level. This nation carries multiple terminal illnesses it refuses to treat. We comfort ourselves with shallow moral outrage that flares only in the wake of catastrophe, but then vanishes once comfort is restored. Our outrage is selective, our compassion conditional, our memory short. I cannot be compelled to weep deeply for those who have built their legacies on hatred and destruction; that is not a political position, but a personal choice rooted in clarity. As Malcolm X once said, “Chickens come home to roost.” As Paul warned, “You reap what you sow.” We are watching in real time what happens when a people sow seeds of violence, pride, and idolatry: the harvest is bitter, and there is no control over the evil it produces.

The gospel being preached in the public square today is often no gospel at all. It is a guilt trip wrapped in cheap grace—a forgiveness that demands no confession, a salvation that produces no transformation. It is a leafy religion that looks alive but bears no fruit. Jesus cursed the fig tree because it promised life and nourishment yet produced nothing but leaves. That fig tree was a sign of a faith that looked holy but was barren of justice and mercy. We are living under that same tree now. America has leaves—grand speeches, patriotic slogans, political rituals—but when we reach for fruit, we find nothing.

Howard Thurman spoke of the “integrity of being,” warning that faith without substance collapses into hypocrisy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer named it “cheap grace.” Desmond Tutu reminded the world that there is no future without forgiveness—but forgiveness requires truth. And truth is what this nation has always resisted. The FBI can mobilize a nationwide manhunt for one shooter while murderers of children walk free, and still, the country pretends that justice is in its DNA. But the right thing has never been in its DNA. What we are reaping is the fruit of what has long been sown.

To live under a fruitless fig tree is to mourn not only the deaths of individuals, but the death of what could have been. It is to acknowledge that our soil is corrupted, that our leaves are deceptive, that our roots are shallow. The only way forward is not cosmetic change, but the burning of the ground itself. Only then can something new grow—something nourished by truth, cultivated in justice, and sustained by love. Otherwise, people will continue to die for no reason, and the seeds of demonic enterprise will keep producing their harvest of destruction.

To mourn a fruitless fig tree is to refuse the lie of appearances, to confront the barrenness we have inherited, and to demand that the soil be broken open for something new. We mourn, yes—but we also declare that mourning is not enough. If fruit is to grow again, the ground itself must change.

A Prophetic Prayer

God of fire and truth,
We come not with soft words but with groans too deep for comfort.
We name before You a nation leafy but barren, loud with promises but empty of justice.
We will not cover its sickness with prayers that cost us nothing.
We will not baptize its violence in patriotic hymns.
We will not call peace where there is no peace.

Tear down the fruitless fig tree, O God.
Burn the soil if You must, until every seed of hatred, greed, and falsehood is consumed.
Uproot every system that feeds on the blood of children.
Expose every lie that dresses itself as righteousness.
Judge the idols of guns, of profit, of empire, and cast them down.

And when the smoke clears, plant in us seeds that cannot be corrupted—
Seeds of truth-telling,
Seeds of righteous anger,
Seeds of mercy that defends the weak,
Seeds of love that does not flinch in the face of evil.

Do not let us rest under barren leaves any longer.
Shake us, strip us, and if You must—break us—
Until we bear the fruit of Your kingdom.

In the name of Jesus, who cursed the tree of hypocrisy and raised the tree of life,
Amen.