A Prophetic Word to Black America: The Shaking and The Waking
The 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin shook me.
At the time I had returned to my hometown of Mims, Florida after losing a job during the 2008 housing crisis. I had found work as a fair housing manager investigating and reporting violations the Fair Housing Act of 1968 for a local law firm. So, although the fair housing implications were immediately obvious, the incident impacted me on a deeper, more personal level. Mims happens to be about 30 miles away from Sanford, Florida where the tragedy occurred. As a Black mom with a son the same age as the child who was murdered, living in such close proximity to a senseless, second Emmett Till tragedy shook me to my very core.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it woke me. It woke me to the fact that almost 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and almost 50 years past Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, there was a dichotomy that could not be ignored. Even as America’s first Black president sat in the Oval Office (a case could be made for saying it was because he sat there), the faulty bedrock of deeply ingrained, widely held racial prejudices, upon which the country was established, had begun to shift. This bedrock both undergirded and provided justification for the hostile policing of Black Americans, even by those not sanctioned with the authority to do so, which had begun in the Reconstruction Era South and continues to this day.
The shifting awakened me to the fact that the last 50 years of America’s racial and social civility was built on this shaky ground and was thus tenuous. It was an unstable façade that varied indirectly with the level of Black success in America. When Blacks were oppressed the façade of civility was firmly intact.
When Blacks progressed, hostility and violence seeped through fissures in the bedrock. A Black president was the ultimate Black success. Trayvon’s murder represented a full shattering of the façade and a portent that a torrent of hostility and violence was to come.
Like the people of Israel, who at the baptism of Jesus said, “it thundered”, some may have mistaken this for a mundane human occurrence. But for those of us with ears attuned to heaven, it was clearly the sounding of a shofar. Signaling both a shaking and a waking; it was a continuum of two conditional prophetic utterances spoken to a nation strictly existing in two communities, but that long since should have been one.
The Shaking
The first utterance was conditional. It offered an opportunity, at a pivotal moment in her history, for America to repent of and turn from her original sin of slavery and all its ingenious shapeshifting reincarnations of the last 150 years. It was a seven-year grace period to consider her ways before the clock of history had counted off 400 years of inhumanity against Black people on this soil. Four hundred years that would effectively mark America’s cup of atrocities full.
On July 13th, 2013 the child’s murderer was released with no justice offered for the spilling of innocent blood that, like Abel’s, still cried out to heaven from the ground. During the ensuing seven-year period, America had countless opportunities to right that wrong. Just as in 1965 the broadcasts of Bloody Sunday via impartial, unassailable television cameras, alerted the world to the depth of Southern vitriol, a peculiar phenomenon over the next few years turned cell phone cameras into thousands of impartial, unassailable witnesses. The façade of a “post racial” America was shattered in plain view of history. No one could claim ignorance as a shocking footage of almost daily bloodshed and even recorded deaths of Black people were broadcast worldwide, on internet platforms unfiltered by the cultural whitewashing of American hegemony.
And the clock ticked on.
Instead of reckoning with her sin, America stiffened her neck. Rather than owning the once secret evil now laid bare, she doubled down. In 2020, in what could only be described as eight minutes and forty six seconds of horror reminiscent of the thousands of Southern lynchings, made into public spectacles over the past century, the wanton, eerily casual murder of a Black man accused of passing a counterfeit bill was caught on cell phone cameras and broadcast around the globe.
If Trayvon Martin’s murder was a shofar blast, George Floyd’s summoned the very host of Heaven. I can hear the fears of founding father Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner until his death, ringing in the atmosphere.
"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!" -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784)
The Waking
The exact date of the second utterance, December 31st, 2018, was as significant as the word itself. While seeking God for a message I was to give later in the evening, I heard Year of Jubilee. As I studied to refresh my memory on this Old Testament festival, I was reminded that it was held every 50 years and was to be a time of liberty, rest from labor, supernatural provision, restoration of possessions, and debt cancellation (Lev 25).
I heard the Spirit of the Lord saying that 2019 was to begin a period of Jubilee for the descendants of enslaved Africans living in America. The seven-year grace period for America, now elapsed, had been seven years of pain for Black America. Mothers endured sons murdered in the street; Jim Crow era policing had been reanimated; voter suppression was both blatant and rampant in the 2018 mid-term elections; and the justice system failed to offer relief despite the hard won victories of the Civil Rights Era. The same truths that were uncovered to force a reckoning for America, effectively traumatized Black Americans. Rehearsing the indignities of enslavement, the farce of Reconstruction, the razing of Seneca Village, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre, Rosewood, and countless other racially motivated nightmares, reopened old wounds that had never properly healed in the first place.
But God has always been a helper of the fatherless and a champion of the downtrodden. He tells us that He is touched by the feelings of our infirmities and He is nigh unto those who are of a broken heart. If this God, our God, sees a sparrow fall, dresses the lilies of the field, and bottles every tear, how much more so does the anguished cry of fifteen million people made in His image and loved by Him, yet oppressed for hundreds of years, rise, even as incense, before His throne?
And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows" (Exodus 3:7)
As I continued, in the coming weeks, to attune my heart to what I was hearing, I learned that the day I delivered this word, marked the 400th year since the first enslaved Africans reached the continent’s shores. It immediately struck me that this four hundred years of bondage and oppression parallels the four hundred years that the Children of Israel spent in Egypt. Thus, the four hundred year parallel is analogous to the definition of Jubilee, making this a double enunciation of the end of bondage, freedom from slavery, and a release from oppression (that shapeshifting reimagining of slavery under which Blacks have been living since the Emancipation Proclamation). A double enunciation is a linguistic cue that what is coming next is being highly emphasized. Like Jesus proclaiming “verily, verily” before delivering to Nicodemus the foundational imperative that he must be born again (John 3:3). This message of freedom from bondage is imperative– emphasized to receive special attention for this people - for this time.
During Jubilee, if a family had sold possessions, particularly land, over the preceding 50 years, those possessions were to be returned. So, Jubilee was also a time of restoration. It was impressed upon me that Black people would have uncommon grace and favor in this period to be restored; repaid for the forced labor stolen from their forebears. Just as the Israelites left Egypt with spoils – God has spoils for this people. This is not limited to money; this also means culture, heritage, history and all the things that make a people, a people. The loss of our identity made us highly susceptible to the dehumanization inflicted upon us. The intentional obscuring of our history resulted in self-hate and with no memory of our past to bolster us, we embraced the lie that there was something inferior about our people. By far, it was one of the most insidious by-products of the 400-year nightmare and it still dogs Black Americans today.
This year we will awaken and remember that we are children of Africa. Descendants of the great empires of Nubia, Mali, Songhai, Timbuktu and Egypt. We are a people who discovered mathematics, astronomy, and medicine; we are the brilliant architects of the pyramids; we created the first writing; and excelled at shipbuilding and navigation long before the Vikings ever set sail. Our kings, like Tirhakah (I Kings 19:9, Isa 37:9) struck fear in the hearts of the world’s armies in antiquity past. Even our women, like the mighty Kandakes of Ethiopia (Acts 8:27), were warriors - the greatest of whom, Amanirenas, thwarted Augustus Caesar - effectively keeping Ethiopia independent under her reign.
This period is going to dispense with prejudice and dispel the myth that there is something inferior about Black people. The COVID-19 virus that has decimated communities of color is teaching us instead that there is something inferior about American policies. A cursory glance at a World Health Organization transmission map shows that Africa has one of the lowest transmissions and death rates in the world. What is the difference between Blacks in America and Blacks in Africa? The racism that has seeped into American systems and institutions relegating Black Americans to the lowest rung of the socio-economic caste system with low paying jobs; little to no sick time; living in closer quarters than their majority counterparts and most detrimentally, no access to health insurance. Even when healthcare is administered, the systemic racism ingrained in that system means that Black Americans are at higher risk of unnecessary death.
Another indicator that the grace period is up is an arising young culture with no appetite for racism. Millennials and Generation Z have taken to the streets en masse to protest alongside the oppressed. They are calling out their parents and holding companies, politicians and even entertainers accountable. Just like Jesus warned in Luke 12:3 – whatsoever ye have spoken in the ear in a closet will be proclaimed upon the rooftops. Ingracious, race-laced words that would have been ignored in years past, are causing even ordinary citizens to lose opportunities and livelihoods in this period. Repercussions that may have taken years in the past, in the age of the internet and social media, are instantaneous as the plowman overtakes the reaper.
According to Herodotus, the Father of History, in his book, the History of Herodotus, we are the people who established human civilization and shared it with the Greeks as an inestimable gift. Even the truth, that the people of scripture are people of color, is becoming clear in this time. Anthropologists are admitting that we are the original man; the very progenitors of life itself, passing along our DNA from the Garden of Eden to every living, breathing human on Earth. In this period of Jubilee, we are awakening as a people from the somnambulant existence of the last 400 years to reclaim our identity and claim our rightful seat, denied us so long, at the table of humanity.
As these words and illustrations unfolded in my heart, I felt for months like Daniel in Chapter 9 of his eponymous writing. Having discovered that the end of his people’s captivity was drawing near, the prophet was not content to wait. Instead, he fasted and prayed with urgency asking God to hear, forgive, and to hearken and do. I feel that same urgency in my spirit. The time reminds me of the two years after the Emancipation Proclamation when no one had told some small pockets of newly freed people that they were at long last free. Who would tell my people?
In the book Standing on the Precipice I speak primarily to Black America, but not exclusively, because God is nigh unto all those who are broken in spirit and contrite in heart. His tenderness of heart cannot resist the humble. So, if that is you, then as I implore my own people, I implore you too to allow this word of hope to wipe away the residue of racism and oppression. First from your soul, then from someone else’s until we’ve reached all the newly freed. I implore you to lean into Daniel’s example; fast, pray, and position yourself to see this word manifest for you even as it has in my own life. The book details how I have become the first fruits of this message which gives me the authority to speak it with boldness and assurance to you. And that I do today.
America has her sins for which to atone. But that is God’s to judge and someone else’s book to write. My mandate is to sound the shofar and awaken my sleeping people to this period of Jubilee. Arise, God’s beloved people, your years of trembling are over.
"…now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." (Romans 13:11)
