A Cure in Black & White

A Review of The Antidote by Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson

Born in 1949 in Alabama, Jesse Lee Peterson lived with his single grandmother and several cousins in a tiny, tin-roofed house on a plantation overseen by his grandfather, who lived up the road with his wife. His parents never married, and his mother harbored a grudge against his father until shortly before her death.

Despite Jim Crow laws, Peterson never hated whites until he moved to South Central LA at age nineteen. Although the economy there was booming, the region swarmed with jobless men, welfare women, and gangs taking their anger into the streets. Black leaders Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Roots author Alex Haley, and others said the white man was to blame, and Peterson listened to them. For twenty years his anger mounted as his life went nowhere. "Hate of the white man in particular gave me a satisfying way to explain all my other failures," he said.

After a Damascus Road-like conversion to the Christian faith of his upbringing, in 1990 he founded BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, to help black men overcome anger and be rebuilt through forgiveness and truth into the men God created them to be.

A Devil's Bargain

In The Antidote, Peterson analyzes the deep ills of the black community. Fueled by white guilt, black rage has been stoked for fifty years or more by the "civil rights" movement, a field now dominated by hustlers, media hacks, politicians, and community organizers. Peterson compares them to alchemists because they "scheme to create wealth without sweat." Unearned benefits, such as welfare, food stamps, payouts from lawsuits, and maybe one day "reparations," which they hold up as the black man's due, require recipients "to sacrifice something of infinite value: the sanctity of the two-parent family. It's a devil's bargain."

To illustrate, he examines the backstories of several troubled black youths and men—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown (of Ferguson, Missouri), Mike Tyson, Richard Pryor, Jesse Jackson, O. J. Simpson, and others whose names are lesser known—to draw out the common threads of black America's ills: fathers who are absent and mothers who are angry at the absent father.

Meaningless sops such as Kwanzaa, Black History Month, and black studies programs, though perhaps well-intentioned, provide no value, but rather "are more about hating white people than they are about loving black people." Combine this with black preachers who prefer judging whites over admonishing their congregants to judge themselves, black socialists, and political betrayals on abortion and marriage, and "the Ku Klux Klan could not have devised a better strategy to kill the soul of the black community."

A Liberator's Provision

What the black community needs most, Peterson says, is restored, godly black men. He challenges black Americans to "get over their 'blackness' and start building character," both in themselves and in others. "The antidote to our communal despair is within reach of every single American, black or white, and its formula is [simple]. God wants us to be free." It all begins with truth and forgiveness, which are spiritual gifts God can give us "only when we admit we are wrong."

The Antidote is an insightful mix of black cultural commentary, spiritual memoir, and solid, no-nonsense preaching. All of it flows from the heart of a redeemed pastor who knows of what he speaks and who practices what he preaches, day by day, one soul at a time. •