The Reverends Emmett G. Price III and Irene Monroe were back on Boston Public Radio for their regular Monday feature, "All Revved Up." Price and Monroe discussed Bernie Sander’s relationship with Cornell West, Black Lives Matter and the black vote, their opinions on Straight Outta Compton, the Pope’s planned visit to Cuba and the United States, and more on Boston Public Radio.
Questions are paraphrased, and responses are edited where noted [...].
Cornell West introduced Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to a racially mixed crowd of about 1000 people at Benedict College, a historically black school in Columbia, South Carolina. Can Bernie Sanders win the African-American vote, or is Hillary Clinton’s legacy too powerful?
Price: Bernie needs to turn it up a couple of notches. I think his move with Cornell West is a brilliant move, I think Bernie has to figure out who he can bring to his kitchen cabinet who can go against The Donald. He needs loud people, who are adamant and passionate about what they care about, and who can broaden out the horizon for what Bernie is passionate about. Bernie has his Vermont thing, the old hippie-type person, but he needs to go back to the Black Lives Matter folks and grab them. He needs to go to the LGBTQ community and grab them. He needs some additional folks to help him make those bridges.
Monroe: He needs to take a crash course in black people 101…and no better person to give him that education than Cornell West…There really is a generational divide in terms of the Hillary vote here. You’ll have a lot of older, mostly women, who will vote for her, for a lot of reasons, sound and unsound. But for a younger generation, she does not resonate at all, so Bernie has an opportunity. It was brilliant to be at a historically black college, to plant yourself there, and say—without having to say—that black lives matter.
Let’s get your reviews of a movie that came out this year: Straight Outta Compton.
Price: I loved it. It shows a lot of humanistic aspects of these gangster rappers who we usually kind of ostracize as being irrelevant to society.
Monroe: While I would agree, and call it an urban street opera, I also call it “straight out of rape culture.” This is a genre of music within the hip hop industry that has built its empire on denigrating and raping women, and portraying black women in the most negative way. While we understand that black men are targeted and are pressed, it should not be done on the backs of black women and LGBTQ people.
Pope Francis is coming to the United States next week. He’s starting in Cuba. After Pope John Paul II went there in 1998, Pope Francis (then a bishop) wrote a book about that, and he’s gotten a lot of credit towards normalization of relations with Cuba.
Price: This is big, because not only did he write the book and understand it from a scholarly perspective, and not only did he help to bridge the relationship with Cuba and the United States, he wants to go back and help bridge the relationship between the Cuban government and the Cuban people. He understands that change happens in phases, and you have to accomplish one thing at a time to the greater goal.
Monroe: We need to talk about the religious geopolitics of all this. This is a ripe time for evangelizing—we need to understand that in 1959, Fidel Castro declared Cuba an atheist country. This is a ripe grounding for him to evangelize. Then there’s the browning of America: He’s coming here because he’s likely not to get Catholics that have been Catholics and left the church, but the immigrant group that have come in. Just because it’s good doesn’t mean there’s not an ulterior motive. He’s holy, but let’s understand he has an agenda.
>>To hear more All Revved Up, click the audio link above. Rev. Emmett G. Price III is a professor of music at Northeastern University, and the author of The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture. Rev. Irene Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist who writes for Huffington Postand Bay Windows.
