Sho Baraka
He was raised by a Black Panther and a Nation of Islam stepfather, taught that Christianity was the white man's tool, and came out the other side. He is the one person here arguing against a position he actually held.
Sho Baraka. Recording artist, writer, and culture curator. Author of He Saw That It Was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World (WaterBrook), with a foreword by Chris Broussard. Co-founder of the AND Campaign and of Forth District; has served as an adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. An original member of the 116 Clique, recording with Reach Records.
Also anchors sessions 2.4, 2.6 of the learning path
Who he is
Sho Baraka is a recording artist and writer. He wrote He Saw That It Was Good, co-founded the AND Campaign and Forth District, has taught as an adjunct at Wake Forest's divinity school, and was an original member of the 116 Clique on Reach Records.
He is in this archive for a reason none of the others can claim. He is not answering an objection he studied. He is answering one he believed, in his own house, as a teenager, and walked out of.
What you are getting in this dossier
Where the accusation came from in his own life, told without a hint of embarrassment about it. His reframe of what kind of objection it actually is, which changes how you answer it. The sharpest line in this whole archive about what the conscious community is unknowingly doing. His defence of the ancestors who "wrote no theology," which will make you rethink the word rigour. And his own limit on identity, which he calls incendiary and which is the most demanding thing in this dossier.
Where he started
He does not present this as a phase. He presents it as an education.
"One thing you have to understand about me is that my mother was a Black Panther. So very black conscious household. We ain't use nothing white in our household. That's just the kind of house we grew up in. And so being aware of who we were, being informed in my Blackness was not even a question. I remember in the seventh grade, my parents made me read the autobiography of Malcolm X. When I would do book reports, they was like, 'You ain't doing no book reports on no white folks, only Black people in this house.'"
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
1,466 more words and 4 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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