TRANSCRIPTION

Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. Today, my guest is Tyler Merritt. Tyler is a Nashville-based actor, comedian, vocalist, and is the creator of the Tyler Merritt Project, and activist. As he says on his website as a six-two, dreadlocked black man living in the South, Merritt is well aware of the stereotypes and their potentially dangerous consequences. To combat this, Tyler began the Tyler Merritt Project, which brings his ethos of love, learn, create, to life through his words and videos. Tyler’s 2018 video, Before you Call the Cops went viral two years after it was released, during the summer of protests following George Floyd’s murder. Since then, his reach has grown wide and he has shared his message of coexistence on the podcast and book circuits and on national and local TV nationwide.

Recently, Tyler’s third book, This Changes Everything, hit bookstores across the country. When Tyler was diagnosed with cancer, everything he thought he knew about what mattered in life changed. This Changes Everything is a humorous and optimistic love letter to this beautiful life. Tyler, welcome to All about Change. So Tyler, I want to tell you that we’ve never met, but listening to your words, listening to your videos, reading your words, your idea of proximity and getting to know you, and after I get to know you, I’ll love you and I feel like I love you. Your message really resonated with me.

Tyler Merritt:

I appreciate that, bro. Also, I know it’s not easy, especially nowadays where proximity can oftentimes not even really feel safe. You know what I mean? It can literally not feel safe nowadays. It doesn’t feel like when I was in elementary school, you just kind of were like, I’m going to get to know the kid next door and their family. Nowadays, it can be tricky. So I appreciate that, man. It means a lot, for real.

Jay Ruderman:

I want to talk about your new book, This Changes Everything, and there’s so much brave vulnerability in the book. I was really impressed about what you were able to share. Now, the book focuses on your cancer diagnosis and recovery, and it could seem like a departure from the other work that you’ve done over your career. But African-Americans have the highest rate of mortality of any racial or ethnic group for all cancers combined. So, can you talk a little bit about how you see this book as part of your activist project that you’ve been working on for the past decade?

Tyler Merritt:

To be clear, I did not want to write a book about cancer. I don’t ever want anybody to have to write a book about cancer again. It just so happens, people ask me all the time, in I Take My Coffee Black, I never talked about cancer, my first book. And I said well, it’s because I didn’t know I had it until I turned I Take My Coffee Black in. Almost a week after I turned it in, suddenly I found out that I had a 28 pound cancerous tumor in my abdomen.

I do okay financially. I am single with no kids, so I’ve had insurance for quite some time. I have a doctor who I see regularly, but that percentage of black people in America is not really that high. People who are continually checking in on their health, people who are invested in making sure that all parts of their body are taken care of, and it’s not because there’s not a desire to want to make sure that we are well, but it’s all tied into systematic racism, in not trusting doctors feeling as if you have to go to somebody, it can be a sign of weakness. Being looked at like, okay, well your health isn’t okay. We really don’t care. There’s a lot of things that are associated with that.

Of course, on top of financial costs, the same way that the entirety of America is affected. When I really dug into talking about cancer, it was almost impossible for me not to be able to look at kind of the causes of death, especially amongst people that look like me and why. And I talk about this in my new book. I’m a black man in America, everything is not fine.

I walk through a million different things every single day and I don’t have the privilege to not have hope as a black man in America. If I wake up and decide I’m just going to leave hope behind, I would never get out of bed. And for me, that funnels into things having to do with my health where I find myself saying it might be a bad day today, but if it’s a bad day where I’m getting to spend it with my nieces and my nephews or I’m getting to spend it with someone that I love. Or hell, if I’m just getting to sit and watch a television show that I think is wildly amusing or touching to me, that to me, the still being here. Man, it’s that thing that is beyond just good. It’s a miracle, and not just if you’re sick. If you’re healthy, it’s a miracle that we are still here and there’s a joy in that.

Jay Ruderman:

That’s a beautiful message. Is that the same when you wear a mask for health reasons, you’re compromised and you’re wearing a mask and people are turning to you and saying, “Hey buddy, what do you got the mask on for?” I mean, is that part of it also?

Tyler Merritt:

100%. And I mean this in a literal sense, not in the trying to be a punk sense. People that still question anybody for still wearing a mask to me are just ignorant. And again, and I don’t mean that in this negative sense. I mean it literally. I feel like they need to educate themselves. I think they need to think about science. I think that there needs to be a little bit of empathy involved, and know that I don’t like wearing a mask. I don’t, but I just came back from a six city tour back to back to back to back to back, and in every airport, in every signing I had a mask on. And because a lot of these people were my people, they didn’t question me, but I found myself going, you don’t know what my story is.

Jay Ruderman:

Exactly.

Tyler Merritt:

And when I see somebody else who has a mask on, I don’t know what their story is either, and honestly, how much does my wearing a mask affect you? Which also, bro, goes into the entirety of the concept of empathy and proximity to anyone. Us not being able to understand what other people are doing unless we allow ourselves to take the time to get to know those things. I would argue to say 99.9% of people, if they were to come to me and like, “Bro, come on man. Why you still got a mask on?” If I were to say, “Thanks for asking, I actually have cancer.” Right after the word cancer, the whole mood would probably shift.

Jay Ruderman:

But I think we don’t understand each other. I mean, I think that’s the point that you’re trying to get at. We make these assumptions in America and maybe other parts of the world, that you’re in this camp, I’m in this camp. This is who you are. This is who I am. I don’t like this thing about you, you don’t like this thing about me. And what I get from your message is like, hey, just back up and try to understand who I am. I might look different, I might be acting different, whatever, but you don’t really know me.

Tyler Merritt:

For me, it goes even deeper. I wish that we had the natural-born empathy to not only want to be curious about another person, but to actually care. If I see somebody who’s wearing a mask, my initial thought doesn’t go into, why are they wearing a mask? And maybe my initial thought goes into, okay, I don’t know who this person is, but I care about them. I care about their wellbeing. And look, I know that that sounds like a whole thing. I know that sounds like make believe of me just going, so what you’re saying Tyler, is you want just the world to be better as humans. And kind of in some way I’m saying, no, man, I just want you to see me and I want to be able to see you the way I do about any singular person that I care about.

Jay Ruderman:

And I know you’re a religious person, and I also consider myself a religious person. How much does that come into it? Your teachings, what you’ve learned, your life experience, there’s God in here and it changes your appreciation, it changes your perspective. And I know you’ve talked about different experiences that you’ve had over your life at a Christian camp and other times when you’re like, my perspective has changed. This is a show about activism, not about religion, but I think religion shapes who we are and shapes our activism.

Tyler Merritt:

At a very, very young age, when I was in middle school, high school age, I went to a church camp and I won’t get all into that story. It’s highly documented in my first book, I Take My Coffee Black, but in that church camp experience, I ended up becoming a Christian and having a spiritual experience with Jesus. Now as a grown person, as an adult in a time period where Christian nationalism is rampant throughout the United States. I’ll tell you and I talk about this in my new book, I don’t even like saying I’m a Christian. I don’t like using that word. And to be really honest with you, I’m not really comfortable really saying the name of Jesus anymore, because I feel like that Jesus that I fell in love with at this quiet summer camp as a young, young child, has been wildly vandalized.

Jay Ruderman:

Really?

Tyler Merritt:

Wildly vandalized. This thing that I care about, this thing to me that is the default of everything having to do with it is love. The idea of this Christianity, which is grace and understanding, accepting all people and loving those who need help and compassion, all of those things has become wildly vandalized into something that it is hard for me to recognize so much that it’s hard for me to even say that I am that thing. Now, why that matters in activism, and I know that there are millions of people who feel the same way. When I’m on tour and I talk about this, it’s when the audience probably comes the most alive, whether they’re Christian or not, they understand what I’m trying to say. That my Jesus isn’t an American flag.

Now, the reason why that affects activism is there are white churches all across America that on Sunday morning, especially after George Floyd, they came together and they were like, you know what? We now put together this social justice team on Wednesday night and if you want to join, go on the computer and come to this class, or we’re going to have a small group over here that’s this. In the black church, the black church Sunday morning has always been the social justice class. In the black church, that’s where individuals come to fight to survive in the United States of America. That is where Martin Luther King, who most people would argue they know something that he said, he was a preacher, he was a man of faith. And so many individuals that do activism are individuals of faith. What makes it so hard now for me is I don’t even want to break my faith into the stories when I begin to talk to people about me caring about them, because the faith that I have, like so many other things has been colonized, man.

Jay Ruderman:

I totally get what you’re saying. I want to ask you, in your book, you write about the strong black man mode. What does that mean to you and why do you feel that you had to curb your instinct to engage in it?

Tyler Merritt:

Because of history. I talk a lot about my mom, but I also talk about my father, but I talk about my father in different ways. And I was on tour this last week, my mom was the Q&A person at one of the things.

Jay Ruderman:

Oh, that’s awesome.

Tyler Merritt:

And she simply asked me, she said, “You talk about me all the time,” and the audience applaud it. And she was like, “Well, why don’t you tell stories about your dad more?” I didn’t know she was going to ask that, and bro, I found myself going, “Can I be honest with you, mom? Because dad’s stories aren’t fun for me.” Most of my dad’s stories are the things that he’s went through and I’ve learned from and I pulled from. They aren’t really about this attaboy compassion that my dad has because that wasn’t how he was raised. He was raised a sharecropper, then he went into the military.

There is something inherent as a black man in America that you have to be tough. I’m not going to say that it’s a poison masculinity. I’m saying that there’s a masculinity that comes along with a black man in America that not only do you have to be tough, but you have to put on a shield almost every single morning, to realize that there are going to be things that come towards you and come at you that you maybe had never imagined and didn’t come at you yesterday. And then with that shield on, you have to begin to figure out in this black man mode that you are in, how are you going to react to the world based on that? Is it going to be through anger? Is it going to be through compassion? Is it going to be through hope? Is it going to be through absolute madness? Is it going to be through rage? And this is just on a Monday, bro.

Black people are not monolithic, right? So I can’t speak on behalf of every actual person. You got a black person that works with you on your podcast. And I’m not even going to lie, even though I know he’s just listening, there’s a part of me that feels like as I talk through this, I can feel little head nods every once in a while when I say some things, not because we are all the same, but there are some things that echo with us as black men that we don’t have to put into words.

Jay Ruderman:

Your viral video, Before you Call the Cops, which was a major turning point in your breakthrough and impact as an activist and what you’ve been able to achieve. And it was praised by Jimmy Kimmel and LeBron James.

Tyler Merritt:

Before you Call the Cops, I just want you to know the first thing that I did when I woke up this morning was yell at my alarm clock. My parents were raised in the South. I have to roll tide or they’ll disown me. They raised me in Las Vegas, that city still has my heart. I hate spiders. I’m a vegetarian, I’m not proud about it. I’ve done goat yoga, I’m really not proud about that. I can tell you every single word off the NWA Straight out of Compton album. I can also sing you every single word from Oklahoma. Bananas are disgusting. I’m a Christian. I spend almost every Sunday morning teaching kids in Sunday school. I am often asked if I’m Muslim, I’m okay with that.

Jay Ruderman:

But you got some critique from the New York Times. And when you get that critique, whether it be in a newspaper or on social media, do you find that critique constructive or does it just pull you down?

Tyler Merritt:

Oh, man. Haven’t talked about this New York Times article in a while, but a real quick summation is in this article, this very specific individual who wrote it felt as if the things that I liked leaned more towards a white personality in a white world. And how difficult was it for people to really relate to me if they were seeing things in me that they were already familiar with? Which he felt kind of what against the concept of James Baldwin, which I’ll just say this. The article was asked not only to me because my whole point is that we as black people are not monolithic. And my specific story does not mean that it is suddenly a white story. I’m a black man in America, I can only tell a black story. That’s all I can tell. Every single day I walk out of the room, I’m black.

I think the reason why it echoed and people felt it so much is because there were black Americans all over the world that watched that and went, “I see me in this. I love NWA, but I also like Wicked. And that’s okay and I don’t necessarily feel like that’s something that I can say out loud without being judged, but you chose to say it and I appreciate it.” And I think there were black people all over the world that did that, and I know this because they began to do similar videos with the same cadence and pace to express how they feel. And then as far as white folks went, or people that weren’t people of color, I think there was this relational internet empathy and proximity that was able to happen because of the video.

Jay Ruderman:

You talked about Las Vegas Academy, and you graduated in 1994 and in 2018 you went viral with Before you Call the Cops, but it sort of flattens you out and you did a lot of hard work as a public figure, as an activist between those years. So, can you talk about the impact between ’94 and 2018, and who you are as a person and what those years made you be?

Tyler Merritt:

I think there are some people, like my great friend Pastor Michael McBride, he lives up in the Bay Area, who he’s like a modern day John Lewis, pretty much. I remember in college being like, “That dude is an activist and he’s going to go on to blah, blah, blah, blah.” I remember filling that in college. If you were to say that to ask him about me, that is not how he felt. He would probably be like, “Tyler was a womanizer, he was a lead singer in a rock band. He was doing all of these things that were kind of self-serving and performative,” because I was an actor. I just have been this way all of my life, right?

But what I didn’t realize in the midst of kind of graduating from high school, from the academy, and living in Nashville, Tennessee after doing music and TV and all these things, I don’t think it occurred to me that my main thread through all those things was storytelling. Is I always was in a place that I wanted to tell a story, be if it was through music, be if it was on stage acting using someone else’s words. The story part of things to me always connected me to people.

And as an acting exercise, as a young person, you’re taught how to watch people so that you can learn their mannerisms. You can learn all of those things and use them later in your acting. I found that my watching people was making me more empathetic towards them. My watching people was allowing me to learn about people that were different than I was. And even though I didn’t set out in ’94 to go, I’m going to be an activist in this world, I think this. If you have a heart and you pay attention to the world that is going on around you, and then you allow yourself to have empathy towards the people that you see, activism is just a natural step into the next part of who you’re going to be as a person.

And you’ve had so many people on this podcast who talked about activism in different ways. Activism can show up in the absolute smallest way possible, or it can show up through a huge, huge voice. And in my story, I couldn’t help but to switch from seeing people, to loving people, to fighting for people.

Jay Ruderman:

And I love the idea of stories, because I think stories resonate with people. They see themselves in the stories, they see similarities, it hits home. They understand the point, rather than just being shouted at. That’s your strength. We talked about this a little bit about you having to face mortality. What do you see pathways to leadership that you can build so that your work continues into the future?

Tyler Merritt:

The late great prophetess, Whitney Houston once said, “I believe the children are a future.” And I do not take that lightly, man. When I start to really look at, my niece and nephew here in Nashville are 13 and 11. And when I start to see how they live in the world right now, when I start to look at the things that are important to them, I’ll ask my niece, Zoe, “Who are you dating?” And she prefers boys, but she appreciates me asking, “Who are you dating,” because she understands that not everybody sees love the same way. When I see that, it’s a little glimpse of hope into the future as to what we can be.

[inaudible 00:22:01] my nephew, Declan. I asked him to read, he’s a little white kid. I asked him to read A Version of a Door Made For Me, my kid’s book. And in that book, I’m walking along with a little white kid as a young kid and I have an experience where this white kid has to make a choice. And Declan, when he was younger, when I wrote this book, he read the book and he came to me. He goes, “Tyler,” Uncle Ty Ty is what he calls me. He said, “Uncle Ty Ty, listen. You get to the point in the book where this woman says something mean to you. But Jack,” who’s a little white kid in the book, he says, he goes, “Never said anything back to her. It’s like, if I was in that, I wouldn’t let her talk bad to you. Why did Jack?” And he goes off.

But then he says this thing, bro, that is so funny. He goes, “Tyler,” and he was young at the time. He goes, “Tyler, listen. You know this Uncle Ty Ty. At my school, I’m friends with all of the blacks.” I hear my little nephew say this, and I’m like, “Whoa, Declan, hold on. Watch who you call blacks?” Right? But there was a part of him that’s just like, “I don’t understand why we aren’t fighting for each other when people talk about our differences.” And as I’m listening to him say those things, I find myself welling up thinking, you’re not going to get everything right all the time, Declan. You’re not going to walk this world always saying the right thing. But I will tell you, as long as your heart is right, we have hope. And I know that part of the reason why Declan’s heart is right is because I’m allowed to pour into his life every day and I actively attempt to do that.

So that long answer is all to say, man, I really do believe if we are continually guiding, speaking life into and encouraging our children, our kids, if we’re doing that, if we see that responsibility and we’re not just looking like, how can we be okay and into the future, but we’re taking this moment to look at our present with these kids. Once I’m gone, I don’t need to have my name on a building, but I do want to know that Declan remembers my words when I’m gone, and that makes him make a better choice in his everyday life.

Jay Ruderman:

Do you have any reflections on the state of communication in the country right now, after you’re out there touring and you’re meeting people? And what do you think things are like right now?

Tyler Merritt:

I’m going to say something that is not going to make a lot of people happy, because it doesn’t make me happy when I say this. I have been to San Jose, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, New Orleans, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, all in probably about a six to seven day period. Everywhere you go, everybody is so different and you can feel this, that, and the other. And I’m sure in some places you can feel… Well, I’ll say this, I live in the South. The historic racial pressure that I feel here is different than I feel in California, but the people? The people are the same. Their hearts are the same.

There are good people all over this United States, and this is hard for people to swallow and I understand why, because I don’t even saying this out of my mouth. Just because someone has a political difference than you does not mean that they are a bad person. And that is hard to hear currently, but it occurs to me every time I go to say something, I don’t know what these people believe. I don’t know what their backgrounds are, but I know that in this moment we’re all in a room together and we are okay, and I have an opportunity to make them feel loved, accepted, and better about who they are. And I feel that all over the United States.

Jay Ruderman:

What’s the work that we need to be focusing on right now? What do you think would make the most difference? I know that that’s a really broad question to end with, but what’s the takeaway?

Tyler Merritt:

I found myself on tour saying to the audience, “Hey, the world needs you.” And then I found myself saying, “I need you,” which is a very true thing. I do need everybody to be the best person they are because it affects me and the people that are around me. And then my girlfriend said to me, “I love that you’re saying that the world needs you and you need them, but can you add on the fact their community needs them?”

And to answer your question, the thing that we can do, and I think that we should all focus on is simple for me. Start with the people that are the closest to you. We are all more than one thing, but there is a mom who is at home right now who is raising a child, listening to this podcast, thinking to themselves, this is all handy dandy Tyler, that you have time to make videos and to go on tour and to write books, but I’m just trying to make sure that this kid sits there in front of me, doesn’t eat glue. Right?

Jay Ruderman:

Right.

Tyler Merritt:

I would say beyond the shadow of a doubt, you are the activist of the future. You are, because you have the ability with somebody who is right there, right next to you, to influence their empathy, to influence the way that they see the world, to teach them to love people in massive, massive groups and not just one type of person. And if we continue to do that, when we run across some absolutely idiotic political decision that is made that may have a lifelong effect on us because we have people in office we feel a certain way of, it might seem huge and major, and how do I fight against that? How you fight against it is by making sure that the people in your circle feel loved now, because we are here now and we are resilient, bro.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you so much for that. Tyler Merritt, I really appreciate you spending time with us. Thank you for being my guest in All About Change, and I hope you go from strength to strength.

Tyler Merritt:

Thanks, bro. I appreciate that. Thank you for creating a community, man, where we’re building a world that we can change.

Jay Ruderman:

Today’s episode was produced by Tanya Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation. That’s it for now, I’m Jay Ruderman, and we’ll see you next time on All About Change.