I've Been Telling the Truth the Wrong Way

A 72-hour reckoning with how I've written about crime, race, and the people I love.

If you have followed me on X for any length of time, you know my feed. A crime clip, a quote-tweet, and a line underneath it sharpened to a point: Can you name the white supremacy or the oppression that caused this? I’ll wait. The next morning brought another clip and another quote-tweet with the same blade. Three days of that, fifteen posts in a row, and I went back recently and read them the way a stranger would.

I am a black man, and by my own framing, I was indicting the group I belong to. The framing said nothing true about me, nothing true about my wife, nothing true about the faithful father three doors down, the deacon in my church, or the boy doing his homework tonight under a single lamp while his city makes noise outside the window.

This essay is what I saw when I finally slowed down. It is not a recantation of the facts. It is a reckoning with the frame.

What I will not take back

The disproportion is real. On homicide and several categories of violent crime, black Americans appear in the national data—as offenders and, let it never be forgotten, as victims—at rates above our share of the population. The footage is real, too. We have all watched the riotous teen takeovers shutting down city blocks, the violent brawls inside restaurants while families try to eat, and we have watched the unprovoked beatings of strangers chosen for the color of their skin and recorded as trophies. I have never believed a Christian is permitted to lie for the sake of comfort, and I am not going to start now by pretending these things are not happening or that the cameras invented them.

The grief is real, too. I am sick of the funerals, sick of the mugshots of boys who should have been carrying textbooks. A conscience that feels nothing in front of murder is the broken one.

I keep the facts, and I keep the grief. What I am laying down is the way I have been carrying both.

A text I almost didn’t read

A pastor who sits across from me on a show I do every week sent me a text in the middle of all this. We are not only brothers in Christ but friends, the kind of friends a man calls when things have been hard, which is a rarer thing in ministry than it ought to be. He sent a long, careful text, the kind a brother writes when he loves you enough to spend an hour saying something he knows you will not want to hear.

I skimmed it because I was busy sharpening the next post. I told myself I would get back to him with the natural and well-sharpened fury of a prized fighter, developing the correct prose to make my point clear and win the argument. That was not the posture of a pastor or a watchman, but of a fighter training to land a combination, and so I kept posting.

Here is where I want you to slow down with me, because I think it matters for more than my story. With every post, the platform learned what I responded to, and it fed me more of it. More clips, more carnage, more material for the blade. By the end of day two, I was angrier than I had been at the start, and my feed had become a closed loop. I was feeding it my outrage, and it was feeding me my next occasion to be outraged, and the cycle tightened with every refresh.

I know what is happening to my own people on these platforms. I have written about what is happening to them. I have warned other men about exactly this, and there I was, a teaching pastor who has read Harari and can give you the chapter and verse on how algorithms imprint themselves on the human person, being formed in real time by the very mechanism I have lectured about. That is the part I want to confess plainly: the algorithm did not care that I knew its name. It does not respect your library. It disciples whoever shows up daily, and I was showing up daily.

On the third morning, I sat down and actually read the pastor’s text. I won’t give you the whole thing, and I won’t pretend I agreed with every line, but the substance of what he wrote was this: sin is not skin-color coded. He named the fatherlessness, the poverty, the incarceration rates, all of it. And then he said something I have not been able to shake. Wherever there’s a turning from God to idolatry, the same fruit grows. The sentence was not new to me. I had said something close to it from a pulpit, written something close to it under my own byline, and used it to correct other men more times than I can count. Perhaps that is what cut. My own words, in another man’s mouth, were being used with clear-eyed precision against me, and there was nowhere to go with them but down.

What I saw when it broke

For a long season, I have written about Reformed and so-called discernment circles where men have made a profession out of cataloging other men’s sins. I have watched ministries I once respected grow brittle and joyless, full of clips and quote-tweets, and the cold pleasure of being right out loud. I have said, in print, that the watchman is told to weep while he warns, and that a watchman who has stopped weeping has quietly become something other than a watchman. I meant every word, and I just could not see that I had walked into the same room and pulled up a chair.

It is easy to see self-righteous prosecution when it is dressed in someone else’s theological tribe, and much harder to see when it is wearing your face. The men I have critiqued and the man I had become were doing the same work with different jerseys on, building the case and filing it, never quite getting around to the gospel I claim is the only thing that has ever raised a dead man.

Disproportion is not causation

Once the heat came down enough for me to think, I had to admit something else. A number that correlates with a people is not an explanation; it is the beginning of a question, and I had been treating it as the end of one.

When you actually chase the question down, race is not the thing doing the work. The single most powerful predictor of whether a young man becomes violent is not the color of his skin. It is whether he grew up with a father in the home, in a neighborhood with some order left in it, under a church that discipled him. Account for fatherlessness, family structure, and the disorder of a place, and the racial gap shrinks dramatically. It shrinks far enough that race stops being a serious candidate for the cause.

We are not over-represented in violence because we are black. We are over-represented in fatherlessness, and therefore we are over-represented in everything fatherlessness produces downstream. The chain runs from the empty chair at the table to the ruin in the street.

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But I have to push it one beat further, because fatherlessness alone is not the whole story. We have built a culture around it that celebrates the very degeneracy it produces. A matriarchal structure has hardened into place that crowns the woman who does not need a man and treats his absence as her strength rather than her wound. Our children are raised on music that glorifies the debauchery, that names the absent father as freedom and the present one as a fool, and that turns every variety of self-destruction into a hook the music producers will pay for. The chain is not only generational; it is curated. Each link is sold back to the next generation as identity. That is not a thing white supremacy did to us last week. It is a thing we have done to ourselves and continue to do, and the gospel will have to address it as such, or it will not address it at all.

The pastor’s line says it better than my paragraph does. Wherever there’s a turning from God to idolatry, the same fruit grows. The fruit in the videos I quote-tweet is the same fruit you find anywhere men are left without fathers in the home and without the fear of God in the church. The skin is incidental, and the idolatry is the cause.

This has a date on it

Here is the fact that should have stopped me cold years ago. The dysfunction I have spent my time documenting is not “black culture.” It is far too young to be a culture at all.

Go back to my grandparents. Under Jim Crow, in conditions not one of us would survive a week of, the two-parent black home was not the exception but the rule. Black men married, and black children were raised by the men who made them. The collapse came later, and it came fast: the share of black children born outside of marriage moved from roughly one in five to roughly seven in ten in about two generations.

A thing that changes that quickly is not an essence and is not in the blood. It was adopted under welfare structures that paid a mother to keep a father out of the house, under a sexual revolution that tore intimacy loose from covenant, and the very black church that once held the line went hollow while it happened. That is the most hopeful sentence I can write, because what was adopted within living memory can be repented of within living memory. “Black culture” tells a man the wound is who he is. The truth tells him it is a wound, recently inflicted, and wounds can heal. One of those is a curse on a people, and the other is the kind of news the gospel was sent to bring.

The diet, and what it was doing to me

There is one more thing to confess, and it is the hardest part to write. I told you I was sick and tired, and I wore the phrase like a credential. But sit with what I had actually been doing to my own soul. Every day, for hours, I was consuming the most depraved fraction of human behavior I could find, concentrated on a loop, and calling the result discernment. It was not discernment but a slow poisoning, and no man stares into that furnace daily and walks away unmarked.

I had started to relish the arrests. YES—I wrote that word more than once when the cuffs went on. Justice should satisfy a man, but it should never delight him. The Word says do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and somewhere along the way, I had begun to. The watchman is told to weep while he warns, and I had stopped weeping. A watchman who has stopped weeping has quietly become something other than a watchman.

Tomeka noticed before I did. She is a talker, and anyone who knows our house knows that, so when she goes quiet on something I have written or posted, that silence is a kind of weather. It does not nag, and it does not argue; it just waits. She knows when I’m having a moment, and she lets me have it, because she also knows the road I am on right then is a road I am walking alone. She will be there when I get back, with open arms and a smile that says she is happy for my safe return. I read three of those posts to her in the middle of those 72 hours, and she did not say much because she did not have to. The silence was the sermon.

Getting back on the wagon

So let me name what this is, plainly. It was a 72-hour bender; I fell off the wagon, and I am getting back on. I am a minister, and for three days I did the work of a prosecutor and called it ministry. That stops here.

I am not going silent. The watchman does not abandon the wall, and I will not pretend the wall is sound when it is breached. But the truth has to be aimed from now on rather than merely fired. The real enemy has a name, and the name is not a people. It is the fatherlessness that produces the lawlessness, and behind both of those is a generation discipled by no one, or worse, discipled by the algorithm that just spent three days trying to disciple me.

From here, I will diagnose less and prescribe more, because I happen to hold the cure: the gospel that makes a dead man new and the church that builds a new man into a husband and a father. That is not theory to me. It is the testimony of my own house, and it is the one sermon I can preach without a single note. When I do cover the darkness, and I will, I want the camera to find the fathers stepping back in and the boys being caught before the street can have them. That is also true, and I simply was not pointing at it. The gospel has to be louder than the indictment because the indictment has never once saved anyone, and I know exactly Who did.

A better blood

The blood of every victim cries up from the ground. I have heard it, and it is why I write at all. But there is another blood, and it speaks a better word than vengeance over every bit of this. The darkness in those videos is real, and it is old—older than my outrage, as old as a brother lying in a field in the fourth chapter of Genesis. It is not the final word, and it never was. If my feed told you otherwise for three days last week, my feed was lying to you about the size of God.

I told the truth the wrong way. By His grace, I intend to tell it the right way now.

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Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

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