The Personal is Political

The fundamentally gospel message of Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson.

Hello friends,

It’s the best of times and the strangest of times. I’m out of town at the moment having an incredible experience conducting a series of interviews for the New York Community Choir book. I’m fully in my element and enjoying the fellowship more than I can say. It’s been good for my soul. I left Nashville somewhat bereft on the heels of the school shooting and then the subsequent turn of events by the repugnant GOP.

As did many Tennesseans, I spent last Thursday watching the fascist Tennessee State legislature expel Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson (and attempt to expel Gloria Johnson) from the Tennessee House of Representatives. There’s a lot more I want to say about this and I am, indeed, writing about it, but I wanted to share Justin Jones’ speech prior to the expulsion vote. I urge you to take twenty minutes and watch this brilliant young man take the powers that be to task. (Update: he was reinstated by the Nashville Council yesterday, April 10th).

What does any of this have to do with #GodsMusicIsMyLife? Well, it’s quite simple.

The music I focus on in my work is inherently political. My work is inherently political. The feminist mantra, the personal is political, continues to be proven to be true. The GOP continues its chiseling away at the personhood of Black people, women, immigrants, gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans communities, drag queens, intellectuals, professors, librarians and anyone who they perceive as outside of their ever-changing and narrowing notion of the confines of white supremacist American-ship. If personhood is made a political matter by the intense outlawing of one’s autonomy over one’s body and mind, then how can one argue that the personal is not political? Therefore, what is reflected in our creative expression is political as well.

Whether it was Teri DeSario writing about rejecting nationalist and militaristic ideologies in Contemporary Christian Music, the New York Community Choir joining forces with Nikki Giovanni and utilizing gospel as part of the freedom call in the Black Arts and Black Power movements or Sylvester bringing the gospel spirit to disco as he explained, “I’m not a drag queen…I’m Sylvester,” music has always been a powerful tool to aid the public in cultivating intellectual thought and expanded consciousness. We must look back and forward at the same time, recognizing signposts from the past that we may not have been aware of, and then connect them to the ways we move forward.

The messages that Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson relayed in their speeches last Thursday are fundamentally gospel. That Jones, Pearson and Johnson are branded as radicals is not surprising, but the reality is, in this culture, truth is viewed as radical when in actuality it is simply coherent. “We need a little more Black Jesus,” Rep. G.A. Hardaway said on the floor of the House of Representatives on Thursday. “The guy with the wooly hair and the bronze feet.” And he’s absolutely right. I will always be grateful that that Jesus found me at fourteen and fundamentally changed my life, my worldview, and my way forward.

I’m sharing a few clips below from the aforementioned artists that each, in their own ways, speak to this truth. Teri DeSario wrote in her 1983 composition “Dig A Little Deeper,” “If you’re looking for the river of life, you’ve got to dig a little deeper…start breaking up the ground…you will find if you’re a seeker.” May we all choose the path of seeking, finding and embracing truth.