Preacher On Preacher Crime

My boy D-Mill, an astute ghetto philospher, has hipped me to a phenomenon that's gone largely ignored. It's a new sort of black-on-black crime. This time, the weapons are a Bible, a pulpit, and depending on how you feel about certain thangs...a jheri curl.

I'm talking about black preacher-on-preacher crime. Or, the holy version of the Time Haters.



Who knew black preachers went after each other like rappers, minus the gats. You thought Nas' rivalry with Puffy and Jay Z was hard? You thought the way LL Cool J used to question Moe Dee's flow was rough?

Lemme introduce you to Pastor James David Manning and his beef with Obama and Creflo Dollar.

Manning's ministry is located in New York. He hates Creflo Dollar, black men, and Obama, but strangely enough, not George Bush, who Manning considers a great leader. Let's say you're on the fence about whether to vote for Obama. Well, Pastor Manning gives you the real reason you shouldn't vote for Obama:



We shouldn't vote for Obama because we don't like his foreign politics, because he's soft on crime, or might be too lax with the national spending. According to Manning, we shouldn't vote for Obama for one reason:

He got a white momma.

Need he say more?

I love a Youtube sensation like this dude. If you scroll through his videos, you'll see other crazy shit he's said. Like, Creflo Dollar is a Times Square pimp. Like, the reason Katrina happened is because no-account, low-down, worthless black men refused to protect their own. Or, my personal favorite: When Manning told Fox News' John Gibson that instead of wasting our time with wanna-be Negroes like Obama, we should be concentrating on someone who is really black, like Wesley Snipes.

See what happens when the wrong Negro gets a microphone and a dictionary?

Manning is apart of this strange underworld of Youtube preachers who seemingly generate hits by cutting into one another and preaching outlandish things. They dress a whole bunch of extremist viewpoints with one or two kernels of truth.

Nevertheless, Pastor Tony Smith came back at Pastor Manning on some Hit 'Em Up shit. You've got a to watch this all the way through. At least to the point where Smith says the main reason we shouldn't trust Manning is because he has a jheri curl and is probably a molester. Oh, and you'll also love Pastor Tony's hype men in the back.



I know this will stun you, but Pastor Smith used to be a pimp. Shocking, I know.

After tapping into the secret world of Pastors Gone Wild, I find myself extremely jealous and disappointed. When I was younger, I had to be in church every Sunday, and at least once a week for a choir meeting or Bible study or something. Had my childhood pastor been like Pastor Smith or Pastor Manning, I would have been up in church four nights a week! Pastor Manning called another pastor an asshole during a sermon. Why couldn't I have had that pastor growing up?

Oh, that's right, cuz I'd be going to hell with gasoline 'draws on.

What Happened To Big Momma?

Ohhh my Lawd...Lawd...Lawd...Lawd!

Mmmmm-hmmm....

Mmmm-hmmm...

'Round these parts, we call this the Coon Roll Call (or CRC). Whenever I see something that's outrageous, so ghetto, so ni--...do I need to repeat the rest? I just remember this scene from Glory.

Oh my Lawd....Lawd...Lawd....Lawd!!!

Today I'm doing the CRC because of this story sent to me by a friend. It's about a 15-year-old who just had a baby. Not desirable, but it happens. But here's the anomaly: the 15-year-old's momma is 29.

A grandma at 29?

Oh my Lawd....Lawd...Lawd....Lawd!!!!

Remember when Bernie Mac said one of the biggest problems in the black community is that Big Momma got wiped out. Y'all know Big Momma, don't you? Big Momma was often the matriarch of the black family. The strong one. The wise one. The storyteller. The one with a strong sense of right and wrong, forgiveness and sadness. Basically, she was the Mama from Soul Food. Or, Maya Angelou.

Lots of things strengthen families, but one thing that's time-honored is a sense of oral history within a family. You need to have that figure, man or woman, that's lived through several decades, who can attest to world and family changes. If grandmothers are great-grandmotheres are suddenly drastically younger, the family itself faces stunted growth. What wisdom could a 29-year-old pass down to a 15-year-old? Maybe they can Soulja Boy together, but that's about it.

Yes, I realize there are some very bright 29 year olds. I'd like to think I was one of them. But even my scope of the world was limited at that age, and I had gone to college and traveled to a variety of different countries. Here we have a 29 year old who become a mother at 13, trying to pass down something to a girl who became a mother at 15. Obviously, the one thing she didn't pass down was an adequate talk about reproduction because the cycle still continued. Trifling begats trifling. And think about the odds of the 29-year-old grandmother being a great-grandmother. I'm betting she'll be one by the time she's 50. Easily.

All that being said, journalistically, there's a ton of things wrong with this story. It's lazy journalism. In the first couple of paragraphs, the journalist admits that teen pregnancies have dropped nationally and locally. So, the journalists finds a perfect mainstream stereotype -- a young, black woman who had a baby by another baby. As Morris Chestnut said in Best Man, the consummate-mother-whore. Nice.

Oh my Lawd...Lawd...lawd....Lawd!!

Mmmm-hmmmmm....

Down Goes The Master Of The Open-Hand Slap

"Beating muthaphuckas like Ike beat Tina..."
-- Biggie Smalls

One of the greatest pimps of all time is gone. The king of the open-hand slap is no more. The dude that gave us one of my favorite lines of all time -- "miss a step today, you be fryin' fish tomorrow" -- has passed away.

OK, I'm not sure if Ike Turner really said that, but Larry Fishburne did in What's Love Got To Do With It. Good enough.

Ike Freakin' Turner died. Of what? I'onknow. All I do know is Ike, on top of being a for real musical genius, is one of the greatest characters America has come to know. Never has someone been so unapologetic about whupping a woman's ass for damn near half her life.

But as I said to a friend earlier tonight, if Ike hadn't discovered Tina, would there have ever been a Tina? If Ike hadn't beat Tina Turner, would she have gone solo? The craziest thing about their story is that the greatest tragedy turned into a huge victory for one of them, and an albatross for the other. If Tina hadn't gotten her ass beat, there is no way she'd be looked at as an iconic woman today. One man's fist is another woman's superstar career.

When Whoopi said, "until you do right by me...everything you do is gonna fail," she coulda been talking about Ike. His greatest downfall was doing Tina wrong. That and wearing outfits like these:

I meannnn...

Who knew a dude that once said "I didn't beat her...with a closed fist" would feel confident enough to wear a go-go belt and heels? For all of Ike's bluster and fuss, he sholl' didn't mind looking like a broke-ass Solid Gold dancer.

Anyway, what made Ike a character is his continual denial that he was, indeed, a character. Ike supposedly was married 14 times, but only four publicly. A couple years ago, Ike penned a song called "Safe Sex." Here are the lyrics:

Sex / I want it every day / There ain't no-body going to take my sex away / Condoms is my best friends / Without condoms I ain't gonna go in.

From the mind of Ike.

In all seriousness, there is a certain teaching tool here with Ike. He was a pioneer. Despite how it may look, Ike was the one who discovered Tina, and if it weren't for his musical genius and intuition, she would never have become an international star. When Ike was really in his heydey, there were hardly any black people getting credit for the music they were producing. Americans, particularly whites, don't like to acknowledge this, but Elvis and several of the legends they idolize stole their music from black folks. Black folk like Ike.

Had Ike never become a cokehead, he might have a legacy like Phil Spector or some of the other great musical talents of our time. Instead, he'll be remembered as the once-genius dude who beat another musical great's ass for damn near 20 years. Just goes to show that it's not what you do that counts, but how you're remembered.