Oct 13, 2026 · 59 min · 10 segments
Can America confront its history of racism and political division without forcing everyone to choose a side? Pastor, author, and Civil Righteousness founder Jonathan Tremaine Thomas joins Faithful…
There's one story in your book that really kind of resonated with me, and it was about Obama.
You had asked him who he was going to vote for, and you're like, I already kind of knew, but you wanted to kind of have that dialogue, right? Yeah.
Um, if, if I, if I remember the way you characterize it properly, it's, it's that there was this sort of like feeling in the black community in 2008 that, yeah, he's, he's black.
Uh, cause I mean, I felt it, you know, I mean, the, the first time I voted was, was for Obama and I was just like, yeah, I got first black president right on, you know? And then it's like my, my own motivated reasoning skills.
But but most of my vote for Obama came from like my third grade teacher who told me that I could never be president because I was black.
Um, it was that time, you know, in that, in that grade where they asked, what do you want to be? Some people were like, yeah, astronaut, fireman, whatever.
And I'm like, I want to be the president, you know? And then my teacher telling me, you can't, you can't do that because you're black.
I just heard the teacher say I couldn't become president because of my skin color.
So I'd love for you just to kind of just dig into dig into that moment more and give us kind of more your perspective of like, like, what did it mean to actually vote for for Obama? And what are what are the things that maybe we missed or, you know, what blinders did a lot of folks in the black community have?
Yeah, I think that moment, again, wanting to have a dialogue with that.
There's one story in your book that really kind of resonated with me, and it was about Obama.
You had asked him who he was going to vote for, and you're like, I already kind of knew, but you wanted to kind of have that dialogue, right? Yeah.
Um, if, if I, if I remember the way you characterize it properly, it's, it's that there was this sort of like feeling in the black community in 2008 that, yeah, he's, he's black.
Uh, cause I mean, I felt it, you know, I mean, the, the first time I voted was, was for Obama and I was just like, yeah, I got first black president right on, you know? And then it's like my, my own motivated reasoning skills.
But but most of my vote for Obama came from like my third grade teacher who told me that I could never be president because I was black.
Um, it was that time, you know, in that, in that grade where they asked, what do you want to be? Some people were like, yeah, astronaut, fireman, whatever.
And I'm like, I want to be the president, you know? And then my teacher telling me, you can't, you can't do that because you're black.
I just heard the teacher say I couldn't become president because of my skin color.
So I'd love for you just to kind of just dig into dig into that moment more and give us kind of more your perspective of like, like, what did it mean to actually vote for for Obama? And what are what are the things that maybe we missed or, you know, what blinders did a lot of folks in the black community have?
Yeah, I think that moment, again, wanting to have a dialogue with that.
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