John Blake is a longtime CNN reporter whose incisive analyses on race, religion and politics tend to elicit strong responses. For example, his viral article on White people using “digital blackface” led to Blake being “roasted” by the internet, a two-word response from Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and surprising revelations from Antoine “Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife” Dodson. Blake is likely to inspire more heated commentary with the release of his new memoir — More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.
More Than I Imagined, Blake’s second book, is a beautifully written, revealing and engaging account in which the journalist turns the lens on himself, unraveling and piecing together key moments of his life — many of them God moments — with exact and engrossing prose. Though ultimately a story of hope and reconciliation, Blake’s journey is marked by neglect and longing — the former due to his “wild and windblown” Marine father and the latter because of his phantom White mother, who disappeared from her children’s lives not long after Blake’s birth. His journey is also one of learning to “overcome a lot of the bitterness that [he] absorbed growing up toward White people” due to the racism he both experienced and witnessed in segregated West Baltimore in the 1970s, but also due to the puzzling rejection of his White relatives.
As he relives painful memories and analyzes their significance, Blake invites readers to think deeply about race and identity, faith and community, and mental health — subjects fraught with confusion and division. For Blake, the key to overcoming the difficulties of life and finding peace rests heavily on what he experienced early on as a Christian.
It was during his undergrad years at Howard University that Blake found himself compelled by what he read in the Bible “of Jesus obliterating any divisions — ethnic, gender, class — that stood between people,” and convinced by a persistent Christian friend to visit “a [W]hite evangelical church whose leaders made interracial solidarity a primary mission of their church.” Blake was amazed to see “Black, [W]hite, and brown people worshipping together.”
“I needed spiritual tools,” he writes in More Than I Imagined. “I first had to join a community where racial reconciliation was demanded and build relationships with people I regarded as enemies. I had to experience what one scholar called ‘radical integration.’”
Racial unity through mutual submission, not Jesus walking on water, “was the real miracle” to him.
Blake believes that “radical integration,” a term coined by legal scholar Michelle Adams, is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the war against white supremacy. Radical integration, as lived out in diverse Christian communities, gave him hope not only for his own broken family but also for America’s future.
“[A]s a reporter writing about race in this country, going back all the way to Rodney King, whenever I wrote about race it was almost always a terrible ending — something never solved, something with the divisions could not be bridged,” Blake told Faithfully Magazine.
But in writing this memoir about his family, “I felt it was going in the opposite direction,” he said. “That felt so odd to me. I felt like, wait a minute, this should be a bad ending. That this should end a different way. That was very strange to me, to write a story about race that was a hopeful and even a happy story.”
In the following Q&A, Blake talks more about his work, being visited by his dead White grandfather, and why he believes there’s a way forward for America on race. It has been edited for clarity and length.
You’ve been reporting on racial issues for 25 years. Did your professional work equip you for your approach to this book?
Yes. That’s a good question. [There] are two ways that it equipped me. One, is that when I tried to tell my story, I told my story through the lens of this young boy becoming a man trying to deal with having this whole side of yourself — a White family that didn’t want anything to do with you because of your race. But I also always try to keep my reporter cap on. So when I would talk about Baltimore where I grew up, I would always try to give the historical and social context to explain why West Baltimore is such a devastated community, why there’s so much anger there. So all these things I learned as a reporter, all these more subtle forms of racism, that kind of found its way into the story. Or, for example, when I talked about going to an interracial church, I tried to utilize my experience as a religion reporter to talk about how difficult it is to create and sustain a multicultural church. So that was one way it kind of helped.
“What stuck out to me is that when I went to this interracial church, and I saw White, Black and Brown people loving one another, hugging one another, calling each other brother and sister, that was a miracle to me, not Jesus walking on water. That was what drew me.”
But the second way that being a reporter kind of shaped it, it was strange. When I write a story about being biracial, people often want to hear about the tug of war between being White and Black. That’s a very familiar character in literature, the tragic mulatto. You’re not accepted in either world. To me, that was difficult. But the most difficult part I experienced was the dueling identities I had as a race reporter and as a person, because as a race reporter I’ve covered some of the worst racial episodes in this country’s history. Everything was so hopeless, things never changed. But as a person I experienced otherwise. Like, in my family, things are changing in ways that I never expected. I’m having hope in White people I never expected to have. So those two are almost at war with one another. The one that had [a kind] of cynical and jaded reporter, but the person who found all this hope in this unexpected place with these unexpected people, my own family.
In the book you reveal these God moments that compelled you onto a path of faith. How did those experiences address your wounds and questions about your identity? Also, do you think there could have been another way for you to find healing outside of faith?
I don’t see how I could have healed the way I did and reconnected with my family if it wasn’t because of not just my faith, but our faith. For example, when I started reaching out to my mother, her sister, and even in an odd way, my mother’s father, we had this common language of faith. And Christianity places so much emphasis on grace, forgiveness — “for we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” So that gave me a sort of humility to kind of say, “Well, I’ve messed up. So let me try to be more open.” That helped me do that.
But more than that, when I started going to those interracial churches…. what I say in the book is that when people were talking to me about becoming a Christian, they were talking about miracles and the cross. That didn’t mean anything to me. What stuck out to me is that when I went to this interracial church, and I saw White, Black and Brown people loving one another, hugging one another, calling each other brother and sister, that was a miracle to me, not Jesus walking on water. That was what drew me. So when I saw that, that gave me more hope and that gave me an example to model in my own personal life when I started reaching out to my mother’s family.
How long have you been a believer now?
Since my sophomore year in college, and I’m an old guy now so it’s been pretty much all my life. I had this belief that I’ve developed over the years as a journalist: I don’t think people change because of information that you give them or books or anything like that. As I say in the book, facts don’t change people, relationships do. I just felt like the church offers this great model of these interracial relationships. If you go back to the book of Acts, Christianity is about all these different types of people coming together in the Roman Empire — male, female, Jew, Greek, slave, free. It finds a way to blend these people to a higher purpose to follow someone to whom differences didn’t make that much…they weren’t things that separated people, they were things that you could transcend. So that story, that community just gave me a language, it gave me a model. I don’t know if I could have connected with my family without that.
I gotta add this too — I don’t think my mother could have survived the way she did without her faith. Think about this, a young White woman who lost possession of her two boys when she’s 19, 20. She’s disowned by her family because she saw a Black man. And she’s spending most of her life in a mental institution away from people. But every time I saw her she was so full of joy, resilience, and hope. She loved reading her scriptures [and] that helped her get through.
Being part of a multiethnic church helped you along in your process of healing and you’re a proponent radical integration. What’s the difference between a multiethnic church and radical integration?
The difference to me between, say, a multiethnic church and a multiethnic church that is radically integrated is this: in a multiethnic church … there are Black and White, Brown people in the pews. But the power structure —who are the leaders? If they’re still all White men, the worship style, if it still reflects one culture, White culture, if all the trappings and elements of it are still White, even though it’s racially mixed, it’s not integrated. Because to be an integrated church environment, you can be yourself, you can bring your whole self. You can see yourself reflected.
For example, I went to a lot of interracial churches early on, where they would just be White-led churches that have Black and Brown people. But the difference between when I went to a church that was radically integrated, is that when I went to the church, I always saw people of color, women in the pews. When we sang songs, it wasn’t just White, European songs, we sang Black spirituals and Spanish songs. We could challenge the pastor if we disagreed with them and the pastor wouldn’t kick us out or anything like that. It’s a place where you could bring your whole self into the church experience. You can see your whole self reflected in the worship, the songs and the theology. That’s very difficult to do, because that means you have to share power. And that’s very difficult for church leaders to do. But that’s the only way to have it.
How have you come to make sense of those appearances by your dead grandfather, especially as you were writing and revisiting memories and asking your brother and wife questions about them? And have there been any more appearances?
I’m glad you asked me about that. With that, first of all, I debated with myself whether I should put that in the book. I had some of my friends say, “Bro, don’t put that in there.” But I had to put it in there because that was a central part of the story. That was a way that I can see my grandfather is more than just this racist who was so mean to me. Then what it said to me is this: that when you study racism, one of the things that you will learn is that White people are victims of racism, too.
For example, on a certain level, you will have antiracists who will say, when White people oppose programs that help Black people, say Obamacare or whatever, it also hurts them. So we’re familiar with that argument that racism hurts White people. But what my grandfather in that visit showed me, is that racism also hurts White people at a deep level in their soul. Racism is something that is learned, it’s taught to people. I think on some level — I know now — that he felt guilt, he felt shame for what he did to my father. He never had a relationship with us, and I think that filled him with so much guilt and agony that, literally beyond the grave, he felt like he had to keep on reaching out to me. He had to keep on reaching out to me because, frankly, when I was a kid, we didn’t know how to process that first experience. My brother and I were like, “What was that?” What do you do with it? And I tried to forget it. But I couldn’t forget it. Because then I got married.
“My generation, we ostensibly have so many more rights and so many more choices. Why are we so pessimistic about the future? I think we have to hold on to that hope.”
Typically, when you get married, you tell your spouse, “I’d like to tell you about some members of my family.” But I didn’t tell her about my grandfather and that weird stuff. But I had to deal with it because she was like, “Who is this man? This White man standing over your bed at night twice?” I had to deal with it, and the only way I could deal with it was through the language of Christianity. So that’s that part in the book where I had to talk to a pastor and say, “Why is he coming back?” He said, “Because he wants to atone.” As that guy told me, he wants to be a sacred memory. He doesn’t want to be remembered as a racist. So when I prayed for him, and when I forgave him when I got to know him, to know that he was more than just this guy who had racism and that he had good sides, it not only freed me, but I think it freed him. And I haven’t heard from him since.
Is there more to the title More Than I Imagined? And does it have a relation to Ephesians 3:20 in the Bible?
It does. It’s kind of like the theme that I’ve seen that’s run through my life. I come from a place in West Baltimore where there’s not a lot of hope. I come from a family situation where you wouldn’t really think there would be a lot of hope. I mean, when you have White members of your family who reject you at birth and for us today to be able to have this kind of relationship…. How did that happen? How can you have a situation where you have White family members that reject you at birth, do all sorts of awful things to your father, but denied that they’re even racist, even though some of them use the n-word and all that? But yet you [become] a family. That was more than I imagined.
What I wanted to take from that as well, is that I feel like we’re at this place in our country right now where a lot of people don’t have a lot of hope for the future. I talked about in the book where I meet so many people who really feel like we can’t get past our racial divisions, that people are too tribal, this is just who we are. And I’m like, “No. If people can change, so can the country.” My family was split by the same racial divisions and political divisions in this country. If we healed, so can others. So I meant “more than I imagined” not just for me. I want people to still imagine that this country can still have a better future, that we have a lot to hope for.
My father and his brothers and sisters grew up in a much more brutal America. My father was born during the Great Depression. He told me he was called the n-word so much that he thought it was his middle name. But he had so much optimism and hope and belief in his country. My generation, we ostensibly have so many more rights and so many more choices. Why are we so pessimistic about the future? I think we have to hold on to that hope. We have to imagine that we can have a better future. I believe we can because I’ve seen it in my family. I’ve seen people change in ways I never thought were possible.
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