”No White Rappers For Me” But Joshua Luke Smith Changed Everything

By Mary Wilson Peed • marybakerwilson@gmail.com • Fort Valley, GA

I have only one rule as a writer for interlinc-online.com—NO white rappers. I mean no disrespect. I gave birth to a son who loves rap music of every ilk. Seriously, he taught his daughter to beat box before she could speak. Rap is just not my genre of choice.

Enter Joshua Luke Smith. I broke my own rule. To be honest, I had no clue who he was until I googled him. And, as providence would have it, I came upon his Ted x Talk, The World Within: Healing Matters of the Heart. I listened. I was moved. I fell in love with his heart. Joshua speaks out and works against the modern day slavery of human trafficking. Slavery and objectification that exists because there is a demand for it. He makes the accurately haunting connection between the driving hunger in a man’s heart to the table that is laid on the back of slaves, admitting to the appetite in his own belly and the need to starve that appetite.

Having three sons, I immediately resonated with this truth and the courage to speak into the chaos so personally.

My middle son, Jonathan Joshua, works for Garmin – he is a lead engineer. His work is global. He has partners and true friends in Russia and Thailand. He is grieved by a world that paints entire people groups with derision, hate, and suspicion. Joshua Luke Smith, although British born, was raised in impoverished northern Pakistan, he understands ethnicity, bias, and diversity. He’s lived it. He speaks not to people groups or prejudice, but to the human condition and changing the world by changing the world in our own hearts.

The heart of the matter is truly a matter of the heart, and Joshua Luke Smith nails it in lyric after lyric.

What’s on my playlist next to “Grace Got You: Mercy Me,” “Water and Dust: Cory Asbury,” and “Known: Tauren Wells?” Joshua Luke Smith’s “All My Friends,” and “Headlights.” Regardless of how you feel about the genre, Joshua Luke Smith is an important voice for this generation. His music is as profound as his Ted X Talk, resonating with his millennial culture as well as the unsettling times we find ourselves in.