Matisyahu is a WHITE GUY???? I am laughing at myself.

Being able to laugh at ourselves and the stereotypes we create in our head....

I have been enjoying the song, "ONE DAY", by Matisyahu since it was continuously played during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa last summer.  The chorus gets stuck in my head all the time:

"All my life I've been waiting for, I've been praying for, for the people to say, that we don't want to fight no more, there'll be no more wars, and our children will play....someday, someday, someday...."

This song is very reminiscent for me of a Reggae/Hawaiian Singer, named Fiji, that I  listen to occasionally, and actually met on one random occasion while living in Hawaii. I'd never looked into who Matisyahu was, what his story was, where he came from. But from the easy reggae beats, the melodic harmonizing, the "exotic" sounding name,  I always figured he was a Black African who had possibly experienced trauma in war in some far off African country, and had some tragic story centered in perseverance that brought him to the United States. And now he's spreading his mission of love and hope through a successful music career. la, la, la....another Emmanuel Jal or Knaan.

Nope.....Today I discovered that Matisyahu is not Black, not African. He's White.

He's white, and he's an American Hasidic Jew. That's right, folks. Hasidic Jew. From New York. He was born Matthew Paul Miller, but is better known as Matisyahu, his Hebrew name. He is a reggae musician, who has had the privilege to work with well known reggae producers Sly and Robbie. 

This is all well and good, and maybe many of you are already aware of who this person is, but for me it was an AHA moment about the stories I create in my head, the assumptions I make. And I had to laugh at myself and recognize that we all make our own conclusions before learning the facts and becoming informed.....

I don't appreciate Matisyahu any less, quite the contrary. But I am reminded that people are very complex. And that no one fits into a box, a label, a preconceived idea of what they are "supposed to be". On the flip side, we often try to label ourselves, or put ourselves into one box or another, and by doing so we're just stifling our truest, complex, versatile and malleable selves. 

MATISYAHU - ONE DAY