By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly Substack newsletter

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” – William Butler Yeats

When I was twenty-one, I tried to take all of Bill Tuttle’s history courses. He was a middle-aged white guy with bushy eyebrows and out-of-control curls who wore tie-dye t-shirts to class. He was warm, welcoming and had a passion for justice. I was enthralled by all his lectures on the Black Freedom Struggle.

What’s weird is that, at the time, I was a white Christian nationalist.

I was an undergrad at the University of Kansas and I was mastering the art of compartmentalizing. I read Dr. King’s speeches and studied the history of housing segregation. I was learning so much, and yet, I kept all that important information in books, in classrooms, in papers, and in the safe, secure corners of my head and heart.

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter. Audio version available here.

Two weeks before Donald Trump bombed Iran under false pretenses to protect an apartheid state’s right to commit genocide on Palestinians and then (true to form) tweeted “now is the time for peace,” the Waymos were burning up in Los Angeles.

Watching that scene from 2,000 miles away brought me back to a Saturday in early Spring, when my friend Sheldon and I drove to downtown LA to march with staff and faculty from UCLA demanding the protection of their international students who have publicly demanded that the university divest from occupation and genocide.

We parked and walked a dozen blocks to the corner of Broadway and Temple. On our way, we were stunned to see our first Waymo, the uber that runs on a Silicon Valley algorithm, now operating in a handful of cities. We struggled to come up with adjectives as we watched this moving car, in the middle of downtown, with no one at the wheel. 

After we drove back to Orange County and had dinner, I was cleaning the kitchen when I heard a horrible crash in front of my mom’s house. Sheldon and I ran outside to find a car up in the bushes of the front yard right across the street.

There was a human driving this car. While we were trying to figure out how he got up there in the bushes, he was revving the engine to the limit, trying to get out. We could see that he hit a parked car next door and then demolished the electric box.

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter

Last week, I wrote about how the social construction project of empire hammers away at our humanity with all sorts of destructive norms. This week, I woke up on Monday morning to the jack-hammering of a construction project two blocks north of us on Rosa Parks Blvd, right across the street from Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church.

It’s Spring in Detroit. These days, the jack-hammering goes into overdrive.

My Celtic ancestors called this season Beltane, a whirling dervish of planting, budding, birds and bees, a time to celebrate abundance, fertility and fresh ideas. Beltane, which begins on May 1, literally means “bright fire.” My deep ancestors on the Emerald Isle cleansed their souls and sparked the land back to life by jumping over bonfires. They did this every year before they drove their cattle out to pasture.

Speaking of pasture, Psalm 23 comes up in the Western Christian lectionary this weekend. This ancient Hebrew text, famously read at funerals, describes the divine as a shepherd who restores our souls by leading us out of imperial construction projects, into a wilderness of green pastures and still waters. This feral Force, overflowing with goodness and steadfast love, is greater than empire itself.

By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly Substack newsletter

In the months after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, I joined counter-protesters at the “White Lives Matter” rally in front of the pier in Huntington Beach, a former sundown town in Southern California. One of the white men who mattered was toting a two-story pole with three flags: the stars-and-stripes, the 18th century “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake and a “Trump 2020: No More Bullshit” banner. He wore a shirt that said, “I stand for the flag and kneel for the cross.”

As I digested his message, I scrolled through all the memory verses stored away in the recesses of my post-evangelical mind. The only passage in the bible that even remotely resembles kneeling for the cross is in the second chapter of Philippians.

The verse from Paul’s letter to a little house church in the Roman colony says that in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is lord. Context matters. The passage subverts the patriotic supremacy of its day. Back then, every knee bowed to Caesar and every tongue confessed that Caesar was lord.

The first Christians pledged allegiance to Something Else.

By Tommy Airey, a re-posted and slightly abridged version of his weekly newsletter

Bernadette Atuahene is a Black woman who grew up fifty miles north of me in Southern California. She is my age and has multiple degrees from places like UCLA, Harvard and Yale. A couple years after Lindsay and I moved to Southwest Detroit, she moved to the Eastside to study the city’s housing crisis. Her research unveiled something truly apocalyptic.

In the decade spanning Barack Obama’s inauguration to George Floyd’s murder, one-third of the entire city of Detroit lost their homes to illegal tax foreclosures. The city overcharged its poorest residents, almost all of them Black. Residents were evicted. Homes were seized and auctioned off. At the same time, the city spent more than a half billion dollars to demolish many of these homes and wealthy white investors were given hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to redevelop the land in their own image.

The only reason that we know about this epidemic of illegal tax foreclosures in Detroit is because Bernadette Atuahene devoted three years of her life to doing the research. The only reason that we know about the poisoning of faucets in Flint is because Black women testified and tested the city’s water on a mass scale. The only reason that we know about the police murder of George Floyd is because a Black woman filmed it on her phone and posted it to her socials. The more I see this trend, the more I wonder what else is happening, hidden behind the curtain called American exceptionalism.

By Tommy Airey, an unabridged end-of-the-year review

On Easter Sunday this year, I made my way out to the sacred place Native people call Wahnabeezee. It’s a 962-acre island in the middle of the Detroit River. I walked over to the willow tree. Right where I snapped a photo of my dad on his final Father’s Day in 2015. He was standing under the long yellow stems that the original stewards of this land used to weave baskets. Dad was looking across the water to Canada. Where enslaved Africans were once ferried to freedom. The last stop of the underground railroad.

On that clear blue Easter morning, I sprinkled some of my dad’s ashes. On the base of the trunk where the lichen was growing. Willow sounds like wallow. The basket tree held my sorrow. Crucifixion came six months later. Samhain summoned me back to my dad’s ashes. When I pulled up, I could not find the willow. It was gone. Not even the trunk. Totally uprooted. The only traces were a few long stems she left behind.

I thought to myself. We truly are living in The Age of the Uprooted. Palestine was heavy on my heart. An oppressed people enduring occupation, apartheid, genocide. For the past seventy-five years. Totally uprooted. I was also thinking about my neighbors. Over the past fifteen years, more than one-third of the entire population of Detroit has been forced to foreclose on their homes. Totally uprooted. Almost all of them Black. Rev. Roslyn Bouier runs a local food pantry. She recently told me that many of these residents now live out of their vehicles. A significant population of women and children sleeping in parked cars.

By Tommy Airey

I am re-reading Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham jail.” MLK wrote the letter 60 years ago to white Christian and Jewish leaders. He lamented their lukewarm acceptance of the racist system. He lamented that they were more interested in order than justice – and that they were content with a kind of peace that forced the oppressed to accept their plight. MLK explained that the nonviolent actions that got him arrested were not creating tension, but simply bringing to the surface the tension that was already there for too long.

This letter is coming to life in those resisting the occupation of Palestinian land and the genocide of Palestinian people. MLK wrote that the movement for Black freedom was turning the monologue into a dialogue. The old Zionist monologue that mutes and cancels anyone with an opposing perspective is fading fast. People of faith and conscience are demanding a real dialogue about this situation. They are breaking the rules of what can be talked about in their families, faith communities, campuses, corporate media outlets and the Democratic Party.