What Does it Mean for White People to Embody Hip-Hop? Emerging from The Way Underground (2025)

When I sat down with Pastor Mike in 2016, as my dissertation was beginning to take shape, I had asked him what he believes white people can learn by engaging with The Way. In his characteristic style of signifyin’ wit (Gates 1988), through a wry smile, he flipped the question right back at me: “What do you think they can learn?”

Through the lens of the hip-hop underground, I understand my entry into The Way as an embodiment of what theologian James Perkinson describes as “racial conversion” in White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (2004). This process involves gaining a clearer understanding of whiteness through cross-racial encounters, which compel white individuals to confront the daily realities of racialized violence faced by non-white individuals.

This reckoning implicates whites in the need for reparative activity, which I interpret as a process of becoming Black in soul (Perkinson 2004; Cone 1990) — that is, a process of embodying an ethical posture toward the world that is rooted and routed in the Black American struggle for sovereignty and expressed through the “communications revolution” (Peterson 2014) which is the hip-hop underground.

The Way is one sight and site of this revolution as it is happening on the ground — or better, in the underground. To illustrate, I turn once again to personal narrative, drawing on instances of cross-cultural encounter to demonstrate the racial conversion taking place within me at a tender time of my own life, when I first made recourse to a Black God as the undercurrent of Black social protest running through my veins.

I am in the back vestibule of The Way, changing into a white robe to cover my white tee-shirt and a bathing suit while in line with three other candidates for baptism. The date is September 14, 2014. It is my 31st birthday and I am celebrating it through a process of Christian re-initiation. Unlike my infant self, I am making this symbolic entrance into new life through free choice.

Now seven months from when I first entered this space, I am more deeply invested in its vision of creating an inclusive space of Christian worship for folks from all walks of life. Between the men’s Bible study, the queer support group, and the hospitality ministry — all of which I am an active part — I feel at home here. I am conscious of the community to which I am committing myself in this public testimony of faith, conscious of the struggle for sovereignty which defines the parameters of this place.

We enter the sanctuary in a single-file line. A large plastic pool, about three feet deep and 10 or 12 feet in diameter, awaits us in the corner of the room to the right of the altar, situated on the structure’s north side, if you’re facing it.

It is my turn to step into the water. It is frigid, straight from the hose.

“Let’s have all the brothers gather ‘round,” Pastor Mike says, calling for fraternal solidarity in a moment of bodily vulnerability. A tight semi-circle forms around me.

What are other people thinking of this white boy getting baptized? I had the audacity to ask myself in that moment. Am I a “brother” in this congregation? Do these other men, these other Black men, consider me one?

Invoking the triune God of ancient Christianity, Pastor Mike places his right hand on the nape of my neck and gently guides me into full submersion with three slow dunks — one for each person of the Holy Trinity. As I emerge from the last of these plunges I feel a grip on my right wrist and a whisper in my ear.

“Raise your fist,” Elder Battle, Pastor Mike’s father, tells me.

I follow orders, giving what looks like a Black Power salute to the sound of applause reverberating through the room.

I am cold and wet but rejuvenated after this icy plunge. My nervous system reset in a way that reflects the results all the health and fitness gurus rave about on social media.

But this feels like more.

I am surprised by joy, to steal the title of a C.S. Lewis (1955) book on grief.

I am made suddenly aware of what it means to be received unconditionally into a company of former strangers, of a group of people castigated as other by the long arm of white law. It is a recognition of community as something which defies borders, which instead taps into a shared understanding of each other as complex beings on a quest for meaning to which the Gospel of Jesus gives shape and form.

I was perhaps too conscious of my whiteness in that moment of immersion and the preparatory moments leading up to it. I remember asking Pastor Mike nervously in the vesting room as I was putting on my baptismal garb, “What do I do?”

The invitation toward embodiment I found in my rebaptism was not something with which this Roman Catholic white boy was familiar. My only experience of this sacrament was as an infant, of which I have no recollection. And my initiation into the Catholic Church in other stages happened at ages in which the agency to give informed consent to faith commitment is questionable: age seven for my First Confession and First Holy Communion; age 13 for Confirmation.

Essentially, I was taking these catechetical leaps of faith for granted as an essential and necessary part of growing up, even as I was invested in what I understood of their meanings. This time, I entered the waters with a fully developed brain, an agent of my own choice, banking on wisdom earned through research on my own life.

In my journal entry on the day, I mark the event as a psychological healing, a turn toward wholeness to which community is indispensable and which I’ll define in more explicit detail below. In preparation for this momentous occasion, Pastor Battle had given a reflection on a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus heals a demoniac — a person possessed. Jesus tells the man to remember God’s mercy and to share this mercy with the people in his village.

In womanist fervor, Pastor Battle draws our attention to the concept of restorative justice and the radical character of Jesus whose example favors “drastic political, economic, or social reform” and embodies a commitment to change the way we interact with the world at the levels of the personal and the social.

“How am I like that demoniac?” I ask myself in writing. “What in me needs to be healed? What darkness needs to be brought to the light?”

I ask these questions aware of my racial anxieties, themselves a function of systemic racism at the level of the personal, and against the backdrop of a compulsion toward fantasy and sexual intrigue I continue to manage today through current communities (most especially the masters swim team of which I am a part). It is an intimacy issue I would, several months after my (re)baptism, come to admit as an addiction in SLAA recovery circles.

In her sermon, Pastor Battle notes that the “evil spirit” recognized Jesus immediately. It was as if the darkness wanted to be seen by God in Jesus. And, as Pastor Battle observes, it was also as if this God wanted to see the darkness in the demoniac. I write of “the ugly” in the demoniac as the point of God’s “re-entry” in humanity, noting the importance of compunction as “a transformative agent,” without which “there is no sense of moral agency — no sense of responsibility for wrongdoing, which is what change is all about as a choice.”

In my journal entry, I frame my rebaptism as a path toward sobriety that begins and ends with showing up for racial justice. Then as now, I understand the event as a significant gift in healing the demoniac within — a triply-inflected ritual of apostasy, exorcism, and initiation (Perkinson 2004) in the face of the false idol of whiteness, a god which Cone (1990) summons us to destroy.

An epitome of my overall experience at The Way, my rebaptism led me to experience God as an explicitly Black Power in the context of community during a time in my life when I was seeking a Higher Power as a strategy for survival (Miller 2013) amid the turmoil of sex addiction.

“Feels like a re-entry into [capital-“C”] Church — the kind for which I’ve been searching for some time now,” I write, “Where God’s love is palpable.”

On that note, I recall a Monday morning a couple months after I was rebaptized. I find myself writing a letter to God, inspired by Celie from Alice Walker’s epistolary The Color Purple (1982), which I’m teaching in a graduate seminar on African American cultural criticism at the GTU. In this letter, I reflect on the past weekend. I’m trying to make sense of a drunken encounter with a stranger at a gay bar in San Francisco’s Castro District, all in celebration of a friend’s 32nd birthday. After a night of carnivalesque frivolity that left me with a hangover, I pushed myself to attend church at The Way, fulfilling my commitment to serve as the hospitality minister that Sunday.

I write about the end of the service when Pastor Mike invited anyone in need of healing to come forward. It was a chance to let our proverbial springs be filled, inspired once again by the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. I write of feeling a strong resistance to being at The Way on this Sunday, unsettled because I know I’ve compromised my values around sex and love.

Despite my hesitation, I go up for a blessing, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a horizontal line with other congregants seeking some kind of validation. Almost immediately, Pastor McBride’s brother, Ben, who is also an ordained minister, approaches me from behind, placing his hands on my shoulders. Invoking Jesus’ name to bring healing, he shifts to my side, resting one hand on my chest and the other on my back. He inhales deeply and then, after a pause, utters this prayer:

Jesus, in your name, I pray for you to release my brother here of all fear and anxiety. Let him be free of distraction so that he can fulfill his destiny. Free him from anxiety. Free him from distraction. Come into him, Spirit. Come, Jesus. Free him from distraction.

I am overtaken by a mixture of grief and relief, feeling like a literal weight was lifted from my shoulders in this laying on of hands. I am dumbfounded by what can only be described as an encounter with the numinous — that felt presence of mystery at work beneath the appearance of all that is, coupled with a sense of having glimpsed the invisible metaphysics at play inside my connection with this person which some would call extra-sensory perception, or just plain psychic. It felt as if Pastor Ben knew exactly what I needed to hear, that he was channeling the very spirit of the man whose name he invoked through empathy and compassion.

In that moment, I was the Samaritan woman, charged with the responsibility to live into the public commitment I was making to community by showing up at The Way in the first place. It was a summons to stop self-medicating my angst through sex. To stop running from life into oblivion. To lean into the pain of being a person. It was a wake-up call riffing on the injunction from Jesus in Mark 8: What does it profit a person to lose his life for the sake of an orgasm?

To this day, I continue to find Higher Power in “community” as Black atheist theologian Anthony Pinn (2012) describes it — that is, as a reciprocal recognition, a proverbial nod or wink, shared between individuals whose respective “quests for complex subjectivity” bring them into shared spaces within the context of a shared value system. The Way is one such space, demarcating a time and a space each Sunday where everyone there works on the “historical arrangement of life” on their own terms (Pinn 2012), with the Jesus story in heart and mind.

While I was not intending to wash myself of my white identity, which I cannot escape, my involvement with The Way was a means and a method by which to reclaim and embody my whiteness as a kind of agency against myself — of becoming Black in soul while remaining white in skin (Perkinson 2004, 250). Guided by a radical Black Christian humanism, exemplified in preaching and ministry at The Way, I was led to reevaluate my understanding of God and my relationship with Jesus, both as a historical figure and a myth.

For me, this meant engaging in Jesus’ message of love and mercy as a means by which to “come clean” with myself as a sex and love addict, freeing me to do the work of historical transformation as a concomitant journey of personal transformation.

The Way is a place where I came to recognize beauty as a “marker of community” and which I experienced through “wholeness” and “symmetry”: “Wholeness” here referring to the development of an identity that can better cope with feelings of alienation and the challenges of life, including its absences, apertures (or holes), and uncertainties; “symmetry” referring to an understanding of the significance of the times and spaces we inhabit, encouraging us to look beyond the superficial differences separating us and to appreciate the deeper layers and nuances of life and how they are interconnected (Pinn 2012, 73–79).

I recognize this work is never done — that (w)holeness is predicated on what’s missing in terms of my embodiment and that negotiating this lack is a lifelong process which forsakes an end, or telos, in favor of a mindfulness about how we engage each other and ourselves in the present moment, as well as in our shared brokenness, our mutual incompleteness (Pinn 2012, 64, 73).

In acknowledging this, I work to short-circuit whiteness in its addictions to absolutes, certainty, completion, compulsion, control, (co)dependency, gratification, immortality, order, perfection, pleasure, possession, sameness, validation–of all those god-idols and exaggerations of (white) self-worth, or white lies, which would have us believe we are God, or which make God into an image of “man” (Driscoll 2015).

These are lies which betray a deep-seated insecurity about our capacity to be loved in the first place. Hence those rituals of Black physical and social death by which the logic of white salvation–what Perkinson (2004) would call the soteriologic of white supremacy–is manifest both interpersonally and politically, making death surrogates of the other out of the white social body’s collective fear of dying (Driscoll 2015; Perkinson 2004).

As an alternative modality of whiteness, I privilege an embodiment of being white which holds it in tension, as a moral crisis (Harvey 2007), by which we experience ourselves as “fractured in wholeness” (Perkinson 2004, 250), despite and because of our collective soteriological aspirations toward the absolute. Through the moral crisis of being white (Harvey 2007), we can work to both refuse and reclaim whiteness as a means by which to “reconstitute racial and national social relations” (94).

It is a “being white” or a white way of being oriented not by anxious fragilities, not by piety nor martyrdom, nor toward filling some existential void through exploitation of the other, but an existential path journeyed in familiarity with the abyss, which is death, the fact that we all die, and by the recognition that our mutual contingency is an invitation to really live — not for ourselves, not for each other, but with each other (Driscoll 2015). It is an embodiment of self that models SLAA’s “Signs of Recovery” by which we exemplify selfless service over selfish gain.

In the context of worship and practice at The Way, through the “encodedness of language” (Peterson 2014) — embedded in the moan and the shout, the rituals of altar call and baptism, the messages of the sermon, the feeling of Black embrace, of embracing Black — my identity as a white man was reduced to “zero volume” (Peterson 2014; Baker 1984).

My sense of self was radically decentered in the process of giving witness to the freedom of Black bodily movement in sermon, song, and dance at The Way. Forged in the crucible of living with the other, shifted in perspective from center to margin in the process, I became better equipped to answer the baptismal call toward a life of service, solidarity, and discipleship in the name and example of a Black Jesus, a Black God — one deeply invested in the work of Black sovereignty, of white divestment, of destroying the white God (Cone 1990) both within and without.

Taking James Cone’s insights to heart, I contend that liberation, which is to say, sovereignty, is an ongoing human activity which entails fighting against whiteness: “the source of human misery” (1990, 101).

As a white male, such liberating activity demands “joining the revolution of the [B]lack community,” of “[destroying oneself] and [being] born again as [a] beautiful [B]lack [person]” (Cone 1990, 103).

To be free in this regard is to fight against whiteness; to be free in this regard is to be Black — “that is, identified with the victims of humiliation in human society and a participant in the liberation of oppressed humanity” (Cone 1990, 101).

Accordingly, “Blackness is a manifestation of the being of God in that it reveals that neither divinity nor humanity reside in white definitions but in liberation from captivity” (Cone 1990, 121).

Thus the work of liberation is not only political, but a spiritually grounded interpersonal affair — a matter of soul retrieval and a method/ology for social repair in line with the fourth step by which we take an honest moral inventory of those character defects that are a function of white fragility (Diangelo 2018) in particular and white religion (Driscoll 2015) in general.

Such is the nature of theopraxis as it was preached and embodied at The Way and which Pastor Mike, in a December 2014 sermon, defined as a practice of “creating the conditions for redemption to happen” — a “nuanced theology of the body” which requires resistance, boycotting, fasting from materialism and “being able to love one another in spite of racial and class differences.”

But it is no facile love, it is a theological task which calls for “the embrace of black bodies” and entails “revolution, transformation, salvation, and healing” for the sake of racial repair. It is an ethical-moral stance which works toward reparations as a political reality, requiring “concrete material responses to the mechanisms and processes through which we have become white, responses that compel moral and political agency on the part of us who are white” (Harvey 2007, 94).

The Way, as a site and sight of the hip-hop underground, necessarily and profoundly destabilized my positionality as a white man in light of the theopraxis it inspired. It held me responsible for my own life in the context of Black sovereignty. Between prayer and protest, I found myself engaged in acts of “race wrestling”: daily, self-reflexive struggles with the category of race, the process of racial formation, issues of racial difference, and how it is that racial inequality is reproduced (Harrison 2009; Pollock 2004).

I meanwhile grappled with how to articulate my life as an out gay man navigating a world in which those of my ilk have limited representation and even fewer models for what a healthy relationship looks like — not by our own choice, but by its historical denial.

The Way Christian Center, as one iteration of the “communications revolution” (Peterson 2014) which is the hip-hop underground, brought me in touch with the promises of my own personhood within and beyond the frame of my identity claims as a cisgendered, gay, white man. In that space and place of covert encounter and Black (w)holeness, of Black holiness, I came face to face with myself in terms of something much bigger than my own white body: the divine Black presence dwelling within and throughout.

White in skin, Black in soul, I have come to understand The Way as I do the hip-hop underground — not as a fetish of white fascination, nor as foil for working out my whiteness — but as a way of life, a spiritual practice predicated on the pursuit of self-possession in a journey of “Gaining One’s Definition,” or just “G.O.D.” for short (Common 1997).

This, against all present and future threats to our shared human existence.