Keion Henderson - Level Ground

I will call it «level ground.» Write that in your notepad; write that wherever you keep your notes. I just want you to write down «level crap,» and you may not know what I’m talking about until the end, so I’m going to need your participation and your attention. All right? Here 's something that I looked up. This blew my mind. First of all, I want to start off with the premise that our country, our world, is built on classism: class — first grade, second grade, middle school, high school, rich, poor, intelligent, dumb. We are so infatuated with class. You get on an airplane; what do you have? First class and coach. In the airport, you have people sitting at the gate and waiting, but if you have a certain class, you can go sit in the lounge. It’s not enough these days just to have a credit card; you 've got to have class. It 's either got to be a green card, a gold card, and if you have a little more class, what a platinum card, and then, fear not, an American Express card. Then, oh, what’s the top class? You’ve got a black card. Everything is class-oriented. I’m on my iPad right now, and I didn’t even think about this until I went back to study this sermon I gave. I gave my iPad to one of my friends, Pastor Derrick Hunt, to download something on it for me, a Bible app, and he’s a guru at it. When he gave me the iPad back, he said, " Kia, I’m going to get me one of those.» I said, «Really?» He said, «Yeah, yours is the fourth generation; I only have the second generation.» Look at that class! He’s willing, and there’s probably not much difference between what I have and what he has, but because we’re so class-oriented, I still carry around — I’ll show you right now if you don’t believe me — I still got this iPhone, and people laugh at it. I think it might be an 8; I don’t care. To me, my daughter’s birthday is coming up, and she asked me for a better class of phone. She 's asking for an iPhone 11, and she’s only seven. She 'll be eight, and she knows that she wants the iPhone 11 with the three cameras, and I guess that’s a Pro. So because you can’t just have the iPhone 11, you’ve got to have the iPhone 11 Pro. We 're inundated with class! I just had my earplugs in, and I’ve got the older generation ones, but if you try the newest — oh my God, they are amazing because they block out sound. They 're of a different class. Everything about class inundates our society; it keeps us trying to keep up with the Joneses. If you drive a Mercedes Benz, you can have a C- Class, but if you want to go a little higher, you can have an E-Class, but if you’re a baller, you get an S- Class. Everybody is inundated and obsessed with class, and you just can’t have the S- Class because if you want to go a little higher than that, then there’s the S- Class with the AMG kit. We 're all inebriated with class! In certain neighborhoods, I’m just trying to get you to picture it: you have the homes in the neighborhood that they call the regular homes, but you know if you go to the other side of the estate section behind the gates, there’s a different class of people and a different class of homes. I just want you to think about that because this entire nation’s problem right now isn’t black and white; that’s the facade. The real issue is that we’re dealing with a system that has segregated us into classes. If you can remember back in the 1800s, during the days of the Confederacy, there was a Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, and he said these words in his speech called the Cornerstone Speech. He said that humans should adhere to the laws of nature. This was the beginning part of a statement that’s going to blow your mind. If you’ve never heard it, he said humans are to adhere to the laws of nature, and then listen to what he says next. He goes on to say that that law was that the position of the Negro — his words — was to be subservient to the white man. This was his thinking, and by the way, for those of us who think that if you are white, you’re Republican, and if you are black, you’re a Democrat, I hate to burst your bubble, but Alexander Stevens was a Democrat, and he was the Vice President of the Confederacy. He said that it is the job, or the position, of the Negro to be subservient to the white man. Now, I know right now you may desire to tune me out and say, «This is not a Sunday morning sermon.» Stick with me, because if you segregate racism and what is going on in our country from history and think this is a new issue, this didn 't start in the 1800s, this doesn’t start in the 1700s, this doesn’t start in the 1600s, this has nothing to do with Christopher Columbus coming to America and then the people bringing African Americans over on ships. If you think that’s where this started, then you cannot solve the issue because you don’t go back to the genesis of the law that was that the position of Black people was to be subservient to white people. That 's classism! That 's classism! That 's classism! And if you’re an African American, you’ve experienced this...