We are a lost people. A lost race. A generation of Africans trapped in America... disconnected from our ancestry, misled by myth, and imprisoned by a spiritual dependency that no longer serves us. I’ve spoken with people across the generational divide - from Gen Z to millennials to baby boomers - and I can say with painful honesty, there may be no redemption for many among the older Black generation. Particularly the baby boomers. Their minds are held hostage by a belief system that demands faith without return, and they cling to it even as their communities crumble around them.
The tragedy lies in the conditioning... the religious indoctrination so deeply rooted that roughly 90% of African American baby boomers, men and women alike, remain convinced that Jesus Christ will one day deliver us from suffering. After more than 400 years of waiting, generation after generation, we must ask: if salvation hasn't come by now, what makes us believe it's coming at all?
Faith can be a source of comfort, a spiritual balm for the soul, and I respect that... for those who need it. But let’s be honest: what we call faith has become a financial transaction with no return, a divine Ponzi scheme where the only true beneficiary is the institution, not the people.
As a rideshare driver navigating every corner of Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, I have a front-row seat to the slow erasure of Black communities. Gentrification is sweeping through our neighborhoods like a plague disguised in polished glass and faux urban charm. Townhomes, condominiums, and high-rises rise from soil once rich with Black roots. From downtown to Memorial Drive, from there to Stone Mountain, long-time residents... families who’ve lived in these neighborhoods for 40, 50, even 60 years... are being priced out. The landscape is changing, and so is the demographic. Yet, in the face of this displacement, our people remain passive, waiting on a savior while their homes are taken brick by brick.
I recently had a conversation with a passenger... sweet, kind, but utterly brainwashed. I told her about my love for plants, my home overflowing with over 100 of them. “You have a gift from God,” she said. A gift. A blessing. Meanwhile, the Kroger in her neighborhood was closing... another sign of economic divestment, another domino in the collapse of Black infrastructure. But when I suggested that we could reverse this trend... reclaim our neighborhoods, buy back our blocks... by simply redirecting the money we pour into churches, the conversation halted. Like always, when I speak this truth to the religiously bound, it goes in one ear and out the other.
Let’s do the math. Conservatively, there are about 35 million Black Christians in the United States. If each donates an average of $240 per month in tithes, offerings, and religious donations, that’s $8.4 billion every single month... nearly $100 billion per year... leaving our hands with no accountability, no community reinvestment, and no infrastructure return. Imagine if even a fraction of that went toward building Black-owned banks, schools, hospitals, tech startups, real estate cooperatives. Imagine channeling that same faith into tangible action. God does not need your money. But Black people do.
We are financing our own oppression. With every dollar dropped in the offering plate, we fuel a system that teaches us to be meek, submissive, and dependent on divine intervention instead of our own collective power. The rare times in history when Black communities built economic independence... Tulsa, Rosewood, Wilmington... they were met with white rage and government-sanctioned destruction. But what if we had $7 or $8 billion a month to rebuild and defend those communities over and over again? No amount of systemic racism could hold us down. No policy could erase us. But instead, our loyalty lies with a myth... Jesus Christ, an apocryphal figure whose story has been weaponized against us, not for us.
The painful truth is that our salvation isn’t coming. Not from above. Not from white America. And not from institutions that have extracted billions from us in the name of hope. The kind of radical self-determination needed to change our condition is within reach... but only if we abandon the fantasy. The likelihood of that happening in this lifetime? Slim to none. And slim packed up and left town a long time ago.
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