Last night I watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Dallas mega-church pastor Bishop T.D. Jakes. Having lived in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area for nine years and driven by The Potter’s House (Jakes’s 30,000-member church) several times, I was curious to hear what kinds of things the two would discuss.
Conversation ranged from marriage equality to sermon-crafting, and from filmmaking to Barack Obama. And much of the interview was spliced with shots of Jakes preaching and Oprah, Gayle King, Tyler Perry, and Terrence Howard sitting in the front pew. Amusingly, no one in the congregation gave a rip that the four bigwigs were there.
But :
We’re an evolving group of people with a history of abuse where many are ensnared to this day while others have escaped. We try to make slavery sound like it was a thousand years ago when it was almost last week. I was a child and growing up with my great- great- grandmother who was born a slave. My great- great- grandfather, his mother was a slave.
We are just a few generations from slavery. It demeaned and destroyed us and every aspect of family and life. And then we were freed, wonderful freed:
Now you’re a father. What’s a father?
Now you should get married. What’s married?
Now you should have a family. What’s a family?
We’re still healing from that. You know that’s gonna take generational healing. You don’t just bounce back and become a father if you never saw a father.
We’re suffering from all of those ills. I call it the molestation of a nation; it creates side effects, low self-esteem, fear, self-hatred—all of that. The drive-by shootings, murders, beating your children, children shooting each other in the street—no value for life. All of those things without any therapy or any treatment, it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. This is our problem; this is our reality, and we have to talk to each other and understand each other and work together to try to make it better.
(You may watch clips from the T.D. Jakes interview on Oprah.com.)
I’ve rarely heard the aftermath of American slavery explained in this manner, analogous to (or worse than) PTSD. And I’ve seldom heard anyone make connections between this “history of abuse” and the problems that plague some black communities.
Indeed, experts usually point to different reasons for these societal “ills”: poverty, insufficient police protection, poor education, unemployment, and white privilege, for example. And with statistics in hand, they are right.
But Jakes’s words (taken alongside the experts’) also seem justifiable. After all, we now know that most forms of abuse—domestic, child, sexual—are generational, and with therapy and treatment, can take generations to heal.
Hope, Solidarity, and Allyship in 2014
I watched this T.D. Jakes interview on the same day that folk-singer Ani di Franco “apologized” for hosting a songwriting retreat on a Louisiana slave plantation and that Tim Wise wrote his commentary on the same. As a result, I suppose I was especially sensitive to the current discussions of slavery and the history of black Americans.
And in 2014, I hope to remain sensitive to similar conversations because, to quote Tim Wise, “unless we [white people] are prepared to place ourselves squarely in the middle of these problems [...] then the future does not bode well for the notion of solidarity and allyship in the struggle against racism. And we will all be the worse off for it.”
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