Chapter 10: MTV, Church and a Much Needed Education

My journey to New York City was long and arduous. I visited there once when I was a child. My family had taken a day trip from New Jersey, where we briefly lived before heading back to the good ol' South.

I distinctly remember that day. It was 1968, and NYC was famous with shocking images of hippies and protests on every TV screen in America. We ventured there to see it all in real life! For hicks like us, it might as well have been another planet. Our mouths were invitational hollows for flies.

Walking hand-in-hand with my Mother, I looked up at her and announced matter-of-factly, "I'm going to live here someday."
She looked down at me, astonished.
"You are? How do you know that?"
"I just do," I shrugged. "I'm going to live here."
I couldn't have known then that love and conviction would indeed bring me back, thirty years later. 

Two catalysts put me on the road to New York: a desperate attempt to save an already doomed relationship, and a deeper pull to understand racism in real time. If ever there was a perfect moment to immerse myself in a genuine melting pot, it was then—the late 90s, when I was 37 years old.

Those first weeks after I arrived delivered a blunt realization: for the first time in my all-white life, I was in the minority. The contrast was both startling and exhilarating. Everywhere I looked I saw people of every imaginable ethnicity and skin tone. I witnessed astonishing expressiveness and unfamiliar mannerisms. I heard new languages and accents. Titillating smells wafted from tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurants while street carts offered authentic foods from lives and lands I knew nothing about. It was an eye-opening panorama pressed into one alluring, elegant, magnificent mess.

Of course, my white Southern conditioning didn’t vanish overnight. While exploring the city, I got lost on the subway more than once, each time fearing for my life. On one such occasion the train pulled into a terminal station, forcing everyone to exit. Disoriented and panicking, I was certain I was in imminent danger. A number of young Black men stood nearby, looking mischievous. What reason would Black teenagers possibly have for gathering on a subway platform except to cause trouble or terrorize a white person? (because all young Black men are up to no good…). Never mind that, as I later learned, there was a high school nearby.

Another time, I boarded the wrong train and found myself heading toward Harlem. My white Southern mind registered the mishap as a death sentence. Dusk was falling and my blood pressure quickly rose. I was shaking from fright as I faltered with the sway of the doomed train. About as sure-footed as a toddler, I teetered toward a Black guy and asked him how to change trains to go in the other direction. His response was immediate—he began shaking too, a mirror to my obvious terror. When our eyes met, my past and present collided into a mind-altering epiphany. Every assumption and prejudice I'd carried suddenly fractured. It became affectingly clear that this man harbored no nefarious intentions toward me—a distressed, racist fellow passenger who needed help. With genuine compassion, he explained how to change trains, both of us still trembling.

After a series of botched interviews and temp assignments, the stars must have aligned in my favor.  I landed a job at MTV in special events. The building at 1515 Broadway held thousands of employees across 54 floors, each with its own personality. Some were sleek and modern, others loud and neon, dripping with pop culture energy. All were alive—except one.

Accounting and payroll operations took place on the fourth floor. The first time I was tasked with running an errand down there from our glamorous upper floor, a fellow white colleague wittingly raised his eyebrows. "Going to the Four? Brace yourself," he warned.

“How come?” I said, unfazed despite my curiosity. 

“You’ll see,” he replied, looking back at his computer screen. 

I headed toward the elevator wondering what he might have meant. I descended 30 floors and stepped off at four. Initially, nothing seemed unusual. Then I pulled open a heavy glass door and stepped into an oven. The space was colorless, zero décor, suffocating and cramped. People were packed into tiny cubicles swimming in boxes and papers. The air was thick from warm bodies and microwaved food. It felt like the air conditioning was struggling to keep up. Passing the break room, I saw an overflowing garbage can. Meandering through the narrow maze, all I saw was a sea of Black faces. When I found the cubicle I was looking for, a woman looked up. "Can I help you?" she asked curtly, visibly overwhelmed by an excessive workload. I couldn't hide my shock as I surveyed the immediate area.

“Wow…” I said, trying to hide my discomfort. I just stood there blinking for a moment then looked back at her. 
 “Yeah, this is where actual work happens,” she replied with muted exasperation.
“Doesn’t seem fair,” I responded, embarrassed in my white skin. 
“HA!” another voice piped loudly, invisible on the other side of the cubicle wall.
In one syllable, her voice spoke generational volumes and rang with a mix of amusement and contempt.

Troubled, I quickly exchanged the work documents with the first woman and hurried back down the hall toward the elevator. "This is so fucking wrong," I muttered under my breath as I rode the elevator back up to cooler air and beautiful views.

When I delivered the documents to my boss, she glanced up and thanked me for handling the errand but quickly turned away from my potent gaze. "Pretty rough, huh? she quietly remarked. It was a statement, not a question. I stood there frozen, staring at the back of her head, then out the window at the beautiful view of the Hudson River.

By the time I’d arrived at MTV in late 1998, Hip Hop had achieved commercial dominance on the network. This was an important breakthrough given MTV's initial resistance to featuring Black artists, insisting that the network was "rock oriented." (Isn’t it ironic that Rock-n-Roll emerged from Black culture, and that it was a Black woman named Sister Rosetta Tharpe that pioneered the heavy guitar riffs that define rock music to this day?)*

In December 1983, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" debuted. When the album grew too titanic to ignore, MTV began airing other Black artists. Five years later, they launched "Yo! MTV Raps," which quickly became one of their most popular shows. Hip Hop soon dominated the network, with subsequent shows like MTV Jams, Direct Effect, and TRL, all pulling in millions in ad dollars.

It was another chapter from the same old story. The white power structure remains content to keep minorities out-of-sight, out-of-mind—until they discovered that diversity was profitable. What had once been excluded now sold millions. The system hadn’t changed—it had just found a new product. Hip Hop became MTV's new darling.

There is a term for this phenomenon developed by legal scholar Derrick Bell. A concept called Interest Convergence.** In a nutshell, Bell suggests that major advancements for Black Americans only occur when it serves the interests of white Americans—especially those in power. This is how it works:

Economic incentives: When racial progress can be monetized or creates economic opportunities for the white majority, it tends to gain wider acceptance.

Image management: When racial inequalities become a public relations problem, companies and institutions suddenly find motivation to address long standing issues.

Symbolic change: Changes that appear significant on the surface but don't fundamentally alter power structures remain the preferred solution for maintaining the status quo.

Conditional acceptance: Advancement for Black Americans is often permitted only on terms acceptable to the white majority, limiting true autonomy and self-determination.

And this, friends, is the crux as to why Critical Race Theory is being chased out of town. The less we know about these structural realities, the less we’re responsible for. 

I wish I could tell you that I raised hell at MTV and started a grassroots movement right there on Broadway. But I didn’t. Like so many white people, I needed to protect what was mine. I was a low-level employee and making waves would be too risky. Who would listen to me anyway? Despite the initial outrage I felt when I witnessed the great gulf between the haves and the have-nots in the workplace, I needed the comfort of my safe white bubble. To soothe my conscience I resorted to what a lot of guilt ridden white folks do. Freebies.

I had access to coveted MTV merchandise and soon made a habit of bringing goods to the fourth floor. Before long, many people there recognized me. This small gesture created a comforting illusion that I was making a difference. Maybe I was, in some pitiful, miniscule way—but not in any way that truly mattered or challenged the system.

Even with the stark reality of racial inequity in my face, I was still affected by the white washing Machine. I remember sitting in a meeting one day with high-level decision makers who were discussing MTV’s falling ratings and investors' frayed nerves. It was due to “poor programming” they said, programming that was no longer connecting with the wider (whiter?) audience. In my naivete I blurted out, “Ha, well I can tell you what the problem is!” smirking and looking around the room. I instantly realized my stupidity when every face turned toward me with a unified expression of “Seriously?” Of course they all knew what the “problem" was. They couldn’t go backwards without causing significant backlash. White people would have to find their Rock-n-Roll somewhere else.

While MTV taught me about systemic racism in corporate America, it was in an entirely different setting where I got a glimpse of what sincere racial reconciliation might look like. I joined a multi-ethnic congregation called New Life Fellowship—a large and thriving church in Elmhurst, Queens.

New Life played a significant role in my education about race. It was a beautiful tapestry of people from nearly every part of the world. The music was a mix of gospel, rock, Latin rhythm, and cultural fusion, and the potlucks were transcendent— a symphony of spices and stories.

But what set New Life apart was its honesty. In our small groups, people talked openly about race, pain, and reconciliation. We didn’t avoid the headlines; we met them head-on. When an unarmed Black man named Sean Bell was killed by police on his wedding day, our pastor addressed it the following Sunday with grief and fury.

One week, instead of a sermon, he gathered a panel of members from different backgrounds to talk about their lived experiences of race. The candor was breathtaking. I remember sitting there, squirming, thinking, “Holy shit. This is what our country needs.”

I stayed at New Life for ten years. It was the first place I learned what real community could look like—one that didn’t center whiteness, but humanity.

When I eventually left New York, I carried two educations with me. One came from a corporation that used Black creativity for profit. The other came from a church that dared to imagine belonging as a spiritual discipline.

Both taught me something vital: the first showed me the machinery of white supremacy; the second, the possibility of repair.

So when my spouse and I packed up and moved to North Carolina, I was hopeful. I knew the state’s history, but I believed I was ready.
The decade in New York had changed how I saw the world—and myself.

But, as I would soon learn, unlearning doesn’t end just because the scenery changes.