Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Memories. Passion alone.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Mourn. Guilt.
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Loneliness. Regret. Peace. Relationships. Unfamiliar. If you put God first, you'll never be last.
[00:00:11] Speaker C: This is grief at the cookout, hosted by DiCarlo Raspberry.
Hello, family.
Welcome to grief at the cookout. It today I have the pleasure of speaking with my fraternal brother, james Joseph Taylor. J. Joseph is a musician, educator, director, and intellectual with command of dizzying array of disciplines and undying commitment to afro American progress.
Join us as we discuss the topics of race, culture, structure, economics, cancel culture, and joy in our rich history unwritten.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Brother man, brother man, brother man, my goodness to thee. Welcome to the cookout, brother.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: So excited to be here, man. Thank you. Thank you again for the invitation.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: I'm just glad you're here. Look, as we do in grief at the Cookout fashion, you got to tell me, what's your favorite cookout food?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: So I have been trying to lose weight, emphasis on the trying.
And I think my lack of success is attributable to the fact that I like all the cookout food.
If your potato salad is authorized, I'm here for it. I like a beef rib. I like a pork rib.
Anything that I can get next to that remind me of the good old days and good people I'm here for.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Man, I love the cookout. That was one of the great things about our culture, is just being able to come together and have some food. And for those that play spades, play spades.
Now, let's be honest. Now, I know sometimes everybody who's black think everybody can play spades.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: And that's not you starting already.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: I'm just saying. And I don't want to be uninvited to the cookout because I don't play spades.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Well, you're being real bougie, because if you come to the cookout, sit down at the spades table and don't know how to play, you ain't got to worry about getting uninvited because you might get cut.
See what they play?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: They play spades and they play what?
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Bidwiss spades. Oh, God, you didn't took it back. You said bid wisp. They play spades. They play peanut. They play tonk pity pat.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Man, you got to love the cookout, man.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Listen here, listen here. When unknown be over there sitting underneath the tree, lightweight judging cousin on the grill, right?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: With the beers in the listen, listen, look.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: That ain't no damn fire.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Y'All. You know how we got to do? We got to open up on that good high note. So this is for black history month. This is episode two of grief at the Cookout. History unwritten. History unwritten. So, bro, when you think of let's take it from two different perspectives here.
Well, two and one the same. When you think of black history month or as I call it, african American heritage month, and when you think of our history unwritten, just those two words right there, where does your mind take you? Where do you go?
[00:04:09] Speaker B: So when I think of African American Heritage Month.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: See, you setting me up because, see, that's the avenue. Like, I like, black history is nice. That's nice. But we're also talking about heritage here.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Well, and that's exactly it. Frat heritage is the key word. Black history is diasporic, or at least it's become diasporic in the last 20 or 30 years. And so it used to be the case when we said Black, we were talking about us. When we said Black Power, that meant something very specific in the United States to say Black now you're talking about Jamaicans and other folks from the CARICOM Nations down in the Caribbean. You're talking about Nigerians and Ghanaians and other folks from the continent. But to talk about African Americanness is to talk about Black folks that were bought here either originally or immigrated here within a certain time span. And so when I talk about Black History Month or African American Heritage Month, I'm talking about the achievements and the culture and all those wonderful things that were handed down from our ancestors that survived American racism because it was truly its own thing. And I think that that gets lost in certain ways when we have this discussion. So that's the first thing or I think that addresses the first question. When you talk about the history being unwritten, it's related to that, right? Because in this shift towards a more diasporic understanding of our history or of our blackness, of our Negrotude, if I can borrow that term from Franz Fanon or perhaps Cheziree AME, either way, we lose some of that heritage in trying to be other people. I'm going to just go ahead and keep it all the way funky, you know what I mean? We love to embrace our dear sport cousins and their different heritages and their different lived experiences and histories.
For whatever reason. I often think that it comes from us being ashamed of our own. But that's what I think about when I think about history unwritten, because something gets lost when you do that, and it's very problematic in my view.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: So now I'm about to add a layer onto everything that you just said, and so let's add on the layer of grief in this community.
The history unwritten has caused grief in our community.
Yeah, let's kind of unpack this for a little bit of the type of grief that it caused economically, structurally, relationships, how we live, all of that.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: So I think the first distinction that we need to make is the difference between indefining grief, right? It draws upon a distinction that's very important, that we really need to point up. And that distinction is the difference between joy and happiness. Yeah, joy is the happiness that joy is happiness that you decide to have, the contentment that you don't let anybody get at. It's not circumstantial by any means. Happiness is purely circumstantial.
You can be unhappy because of your situation, whatever that might be.
Somebody died. Something was taken from you. You were put upon in some way, shape or form that will bother your happiness.
But joy is literally the decision to not feed into that beyond the initial human reaction that we all have to these sorts of things. And so for me, I define grief as relinquishing my joy.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: That's good.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: You have to let somebody take your joy. There was this song back in the early aughts. I can't remember the artist's name, but she said in the chorus, she was saying, the thieves are at it again.
Still in my peace of mind, but they won't win because of the joy that I have within. And so that hit me. I think, God, I couldn't have been no more than 1516 years old, but I was like, Yo, that's heavy. You know what I mean? And I went to church later, and my pastor at the time reiterated this. And this was something that our elders taught us historically, when we look at the Maya Angelou's and just other folks that were in the movement when moving was much harder than it is now, they taught us this when they were at their best through the way they lived their lives and moved through the world. And so this, again touches on your question.
When we talk about black history and how some of that history gets lost, we also lose this wisdom around how to keep our joy, how to not let people steal our joy, how to be human and feel whatever is impacting us at the given moment, but not to dwell in that place. And I think, to your point, that branches off in a bunch of different places, because if you let somebody steal your joy because they've temporarily made you unhappy, what ends up happening is you become depressed, you become downtrodden, and as we often hear people say, hurting people. Hurt people.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: So your relationships will be suspect and undermined.
You'll have trouble at work. It'll show on you when you're moving through the world, and you'll have difficulty establishing and cultivating new relationships.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: And so it's also cyclical, I think, when you're feeling all of this and you're internalizing it and not letting it go in healthy ways, because we do need to fight against injustice. I don't want that to be misconstrued at all, right? But at the same time, we're fighting against injustice. We need to remember what all sailors know. It's not the water that knocks up against the boat that sinks you. It's the water that gets inside the boat.
And so while we're going through these storms, and we're going to go through storms if we're out on the water, it's just an ecological reality and an existential reality. We just need to make sure that we're not letting that water remain in the boat. And so when we don't do that again, we have all these ill side effects. And the more we get away from our culture, the more we undermine our ability to keep that water from getting in our boat and sinking us ultimately.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: So this is a good segue because you said culture.
And so something just popped into my mind recently.
As we're talking about grief, we talk about culture and we talk about our history unwritten. We also talk about race. And race is something that's prominent in our culture.
I got a feeling you know where I'm about to go.
So when we talk about cancel culture, for instance, recently something happened with Whoopi Goldberg on the view regarding race, regarding the Jewish nationality and her statement on that.
And as I'm walking this fine line, because it's a fine line that has to be walked when we're talking about this, why do you think it was so hard for people? And I'm just going to say people because we know who they are to not in some way understand the avenue which she was coming from when she made that statement.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: I'm going to be frank. I think there was a little bit of opportunism, as there has always been around these things. This weekend I bought a book about Gunner Myrtle's 1944 excuse me book, An American Dilemma, which was like one of the original books on race relations in the United States after the Souls of Black Folks, which an actual black person wrote. It's one of the most influential books on race relations that had crossover appeal, right? And so I bring up that book to say, or rather, I bring up the book that I bought this weekend, to echo what this writer is saying in the book, that Gunner Myrtle's book, which was commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment, that didn't have anything to do with actually helping black folks. They were trying to come up with policy on how to deal with black folks and in knowing that black folks have kind of always taken responsibility for themselves. And we came up with strategies and things of that nature to advance ourselves.
And folks saw that it was successful. We got the Voting Rights Act, thanks in no small part because I need to be intellectually honest as well if I'm going to call out the intellectual dishonesty that I'm leading up to in this preamble. Right, thanks in large part to certain foreign policy realities that existed at the time. We got the Voting Rights Act, but folks saw the strategy that we used.
We had Martin Luther King, who was knowledgeable and said, look, you can't be at the UN talking to these decolonized countries, telling them how you want to be the new leader of the free world when you don't treat black people right. And so that became a strategy that was used sort of this guilt offensive, this hypocrisy offensive. And that strategy has been lifted by other so, you know, what we had in the Whoopi Goldberg situation was folks sort of playing that strategy. But again, doing so, I think in a disingenuous sort of like the reality is that race in America has a specific meaning and we are in America. And when you're in when you use the definitions that are of the place that you were in, granted, she was factually wrong because Hitler did know they're an inferior race and so it was like, by definition, racism. But I think the thing that we need to be careful of, and this speaks to your question about cancel culture is that we need to be reasonable. You know what I mean? It doesn't really make sense for you to hold Whoopi Goldberg to the same standard that you would hold a college educated scholar to. She might have a degree from somewhere, but I'm pretty sure that is not in history or sociology or something like that. And so to ask her to sort of make that fine distinction when she's just speaking off the cuff, so to speak, that doesn't really make sense. And I think that the folks who seized on this, who seemed angry about this because there were members of the Jewish community that were like, yeah, we get what she was saying, it just wasn't as precise as it should have been.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Right?
[00:18:00] Speaker B: And again, my critique to that argument is, well, how precise do we expect a comedian speaking off the top of her head to be? But there were also folks who were upset and I think that they were just being like a bit disingenuous.
They wanted to play the race card, so to say. And it was one of those deals. So it is what it is.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Right. I think for me, the understanding what the factual definition of race is and understanding what race, when we a lot of people, especially in the black community, think of race as the first thing that comes to mind is a color because that has often been associated with us as black people. We are race, but we are also colored, darker hue, skin, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: And so I will say what kind of took my joy, what I let relinquish my joy in the moment of this was how she was dealt with.
Knowing that there has been many comments from many people of the Caucasian community on that show that has made so many non factual comments and they have not been dealt with the way that.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: She was dealt with.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: And I appreciate her even coming back to the show after that hiatus, saying that we are going to have many conversations like this, hard conversations. But it just kind of.
[00:20:00] Speaker C: Took me.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Back a little bit with the current place of our race, of our economic status, our status as a whole, where we are and how we are continually to be dealt with in certain manners. When people don't like what we say.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Well, I read an article over the weekend that I really should have sent to you ahead of this conversation called Who Gets to Create Black Culture?
And it talks about know, basically everybody that we cheerlead in Hollywood comes from a very specific background.
To your point, when people think about blackness in this country or when we talk about race in this country, we're pretty much talking about black people.
There are certain instances where, again, people will seize on race and the tactics of, I guess I should say, the social justice practice around race that was meant by our people. When it comes to other groups, most recently the wave of senseless violence against members of the Asian community writ large.
But generally they're talking about us. And this article asked, well, who gets? The article also pointed out that when you talk about black people, we're also generally talking about poor black people. Those are the people who are considered authentically black.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: And there is like a contingent within our community that takes umbrage at that because we like to see ourselves as having progressed. Again, I'm a communitarian. And so being someone that's from the inner city and sort of came back to the inner city after having some great experience and been afforded access that not everybody from where I'm from gets I appreciated the acknowledgment, but the article went on to make this point and say, look, everybody that you all are cheerleading, they basically have the same background. Like they went to private school, then they went to an Ivy League school, they're typically a woman. And now they out in Hollywood writing about poor black people.
And I think that article is relevant to the question that you ask because it's the same sort of deal. Like everybody that's out here screaming about race and social justice and all of this, they haven't really had that experience like you're, you're like, have you really been put upon or is it one of these things where you don't want people to ever forget?
It's almost a hustle to some extent, you know what I mean? When you look at what we've paid out to Israel, for example, it's a bit wild. And to your point, we out here just trying to get our student loans forgiven.
We try and get equal value for our houses when we sell them without having to have one of our white friends come and stand in for us, without having to put pictures of a white family all over the house, you know what I mean?
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Facing Regentrification, it's not even gentrification because.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: This is happening to people out in the suburbs. It's brothers and sisters out in the suburbs who will ride through and if they see too many black families, they know not to move there because one more will bring the property value of everything in there down.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Right, but I mean, as this is happening in the inner cities, yeah, absolutely has been happening that is going on, as well as realizing if there are too many black people in just the suburban community, like you said, that it will bring the value down.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's like it's happening on both sides. If we're all together in the inner city, they won't invest. If we move to the suburbs, it's somehow less valuable because it is a market, after all. And markets are subjective, you know what I mean? Demand is always a matter of subjectivity at the beginning. So it goes back to this sort of question, right? Who's really oppressed what level of oppression, who should really be using these tactics and making these and like that that's the question. And to, your know, we're still being handled a certain way because I've always been because as Michael Jackson said, they don't really care about you know, I was explaining this to a white guy yesterday, and I said and I'm sure you're gonna get some emails about what I'm about to say, but I've been suspicious of Barack Obama since I was in college. And I don't fool with Kamala Harris precisely because they are the preferred black.
They don't really have the heritage that we were talking about, the Afro African American heritage that we were discussing. So that sort of mistrust and fury isn't in their bones. They're of a particular complexion.
They code switch, they come off a certain way. They're international black.
And so what that equals up to is that they're easier to deal with interpersonally.
There's no complication that comes from the due mistrust that any slave descended or American slave descended black person should have of these institutions.
And they don't have the ties to the black community that are going to cause them to have issue with being bought and have issue with paying fealty to those.
See this, we see this with slave descended Afro Americans. Like, this is literally the difference between a Cornell West and a Michael Eric Dyson.
This is the and like, I remember friends from Boston when we were in college that sort of drifted away from me when I was like, yeah, Michael Eric Dyson is on some bullshit, you know what I'm saying? Like, he is dick riding Obama for the White House exclusive and the White House access.
He is turning his back on these folks. See, I'm old enough to remember when Michael Eric Dyson was just happy to be in the room on PBS specials with Cornell West and Tavis Smiley. Like, this cat is on the make. And we do have that in the black community. But by and large, and again, referencing this article I was telling you about, there is a very particular type of black person that they and like, I see this at the highest levels.
I did college access work for the Urban League and that was definitely the Hustle. It was like, yo, we need you to affect this sort of aesthetic so that you can fly under the radar and get all this stuff. Smile at as many white folks as you can because they love to give black folks we all know what the hustle is, but the fact of the matter is that it shouldn't be in place.
From Jump. And so I think that's what we're sort of getting at when we speak about what happened with Whoopi Goldberg, because even going back to her in the 1990s, when she was dating the dude from Cheers, the tall white guy, and she was tight with Robin Williams and the other guy, I can't remember his name, but Jewish.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: I can't think of his name. Yeah, I know.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Jewish cat. Hilarious. But she was white folks'favorite, black person, and that's how she ended up on The View in the first place. Oprah had the same.
But, like, what we as a people have to look at is if we got to turn into something other than us for them to like us, they.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Don'T really like us, but do they really like us?
You know what I mean?
When you talk about the acceptable blacks, in your opinion, would you associate that with some type of form of elitism?
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Well, see, frat now you're making me tell on myself.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Well, because here's the thing, folks. This is really like a whole rabbit hole, because as we're talking about history unwritten, we talk about things like black Wall Street and the things that black people had. But as it pertains to grief in America and our history, when we look at the African Americans who are in power and the African Americans who are, quote, unquote, acceptable, there is some level of elitism that comes with that with that power.
And it's amazing to me how we look at people who have been a part of the civil rights movement, as you stated, cornell West, Dr. Cornell west, many others who, in my opinion let me put it this way, that should be seen on a very high pedestal, even to gosh I can't think of his name.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Du Bois.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yes, Du Bois. Not just Du Bois.
Crap. His name is Escaping because I love to listen to him speak.
Leader of our Islam community, Minister Farrakhan.
Yes. We look at these people. It's just interesting to me what you said as it pertains to the acceptable black.
And that's why I asked, do they really like us? Well, see, we have to come packaged a certain way. We have to come this way to achieve what you have to do different things.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: What you have to do is signal that you're going to pledge fealty to the system as it is. And the system as it is serves the white Anglo Saxon Protestant, which is weird, because there aren't even really that many of them around anymore. There is still society, but they're not really around like that. And so it's so bad that they've even gone undercover.
You won't have people telegraphing that their ancestor came over on the Mayflower, we were in Boston. Like the people that lived over in Beacon Hill. They don't telegraph that. They move a certain way, and if you're in the know, you recognize it, but they're not telegraphing that. So the idea that there's still a system that serves these folks, it speaks to power and how economics are bent to serve power. But that's really what it comes down to, is the fact that there is a system in place and that system is being protected. And the only black people that they want are the ones who are pledging fealty to that system.
So that's what the packaging is about. And there are black folks who, for many reasons, some understandable, some not, have just said, we can't beat it, so we might as well just fall in line with it. And getting back to the connection to grief, that's a sign of the water that got into the boat and it came down generationally. They killed Malcolm, they killed Martin, they killed Megar, and then they oppressed the Black Panthers.
And after seeing all of that, seeing people be beaten by the police in your communities, seeing people be railroaded by the criminal justice system, seeing people who ran afoul of politicians that run these systems and not being able to fight back and win those political fights, those proxy wars.
People said we can't beat them.
So we just going to fall in line. We're going to become respectable, and we're going to signal that we're respectful to this system. I said that you were going to force me to tell on me because I was really naive. When we were in college, I wore the peacoat.
I had the skinniest jeans, the slacks, the shoes.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Man, I was dressed, sir, you were dressed every time I saw you.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: I was cleaner than the Board of Health.
Shit, I had white girls going, white girl look frat white girls was like, this is that Sydney Portier? Shit.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: While I'm in sweats, standing next to.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Dreads up in the knot, right?
[00:35:15] Speaker A: And a durag.
I had the durag, the boots, the sweats.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Listen, because I knew where I came from. I knew that this was the only way we were going to get out. But where I was naive was in that I really thought that I was elite, because I knew how to put forward this aesthetic.
Hold on, let me finish this before you jump in. I knew how to put forth this aesthetic, and I held myself to a certain standard intellectually and in terms of my work product. And so I got to a point where my grandfather died, and this was shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, where wasn't nobody really trying to help me. All they really cared about, I realized, was that he isn't one of those hoodlums. He's safe. We can have conversations. And there are levels to that when they're walking down the street. If you got a hoodie on you might be a problem. Unless it has a college logo on it, then you're safe when you're at the job.
Well, he works well and he's black and so we didn't met our quota and he won't be talking about all this civil rights shit. So when we're getting ready to fire people that we should have never hired in the first place and didn't train, we don't have to worry about him helping the EEOC office.
Then when it comes to politics, it's know they present well and they vote the right way, but they don't never ask for anything. They're safe.
And then we see it with our leaders. They come in, they write these black stories or they write the black stories that we're comfortable with.
And when the academy comes knocking on the door, we can point to them.
I call this neotokenism.
Go ahead, expound on that because it's the same token. You're still a token. It just looks different.
It's polished up.
It's racism. That's pretty as a new penny ergo.
You're a neo token.
Yeah. And I got hip because I was like the patriarch of my family is gone.
What am I demonstrating for my younger brothers?
What legacy am I demonstrating to people when I go out as the representative of my family?
Is this really the way I want to reflect the manhood that my grandfather tried to instill in me? Basically bowing and scraping and carrying on. And what I've been doing since that time is applying a very rigorous framework to my decision making. Right.
I read a book in law school.
I read a case called McCleskey and it knocked me out of law school. That was like where I really had what Paul Mooney calls the nigger wake up call and a brother by the name of Andre Smith who was like the only black male law professor there. Dreads, absolutely brilliant, unfuck witable, you know what I mean? He put me up on a bunch of people that I'm still reading to this day. It's actually what caused me to pursue my degree in international relations and highly he hit me to Derek Bell and he sort of shifted Dr. Bell's thought experiment and this is how I vet my decisions and the things that I do. And I think it's very helpful for black folks. So I'm going to share this with you.
He said, if an island popped up between Africa and the US and only Afro Americans folks that rightly celebrate, or black people for whom African American Heritage Month is coined and celebrates could go to that island, how would you organize society?
And so when I'm thinking about how I'm treating another black person, when I'm thinking about how I should vote and all of these things, when I'm thinking about health and wellness, this is what I'm thinking about. And it allows me to step into mainstream culture or it allows me to interact with Western European. Culture or even, like I said, our diasporic cousins in Africa or in the Caribbean and say to myself, like, yo is either this is just, like, good. Like, this is just good shit. Like, as artists, you know what I mean?
[00:40:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: As artists, we look and we go, symmetry is a good look. Symmetry isn't white shit. Symmetry is just good shit. You know what I mean?
It allows me to make those judgment calls in other contexts, if that makes any sense.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: And so that is how do it. And that's how I weighed up the Whoopi Goldberg situation. I'm like, Yo, I don't think any other culture would look at one of their comedians and be like, why didn't you define your terms?
We asked scholars to define their terms. We asked lawyers to define their terms in, like, a serious debate. We ask people to define their terms. But this is a damn talk show.
You know what history in the history of Jewish intellectual thought, you know what I'm saying? Like, you read Hannah Aren't, and people like, see, you never see them treat a Billy Crystal like a Hannah Aren't. No one does that to their own people. We only ever try to do it to other people again, for opportunistic reasons. And again, this is like another one of these hot takes you probably go and get calls about. But this is why I've never believed in sort of, like, getting special treatment purely let me make sure I phrased this correctly. I've never believed in having a lower standard because you're black or having someone apply a lower standard to you because you're black.
If some shit don't make sense, it just don't make sense, like, across the board. So, like, shit, if a person makes a criticism of a black person, that makes sense. I'm here for it most of the time, and I say most of the time because we do know that there are people and cats who truly are in the ivory tower in these sort of elite spaces. They specialize in making sound arguments with terrible motives.
That's why I say most of the time.
But if something makes sense, it makes sense. I do believe in letting a people deal with their own people. I don't think the criminal justice system has any right adjudicating over black people.
But at the same time, black folks need to be thorough enough in their thought and in their moral rectitude and their moral practice to deal with their own folks. I'm writing an article about that now. Like, this local senator in Delaware did something egregious whole domestic violence situation. And I'm saying, look, y'all have no credibility.
Give them to us. We'll deal with them. And in that same article, I'm saying, look, black community, as I'm telling them that they have no credibility, don't let us fail to have credibility when he's handed to us. We need to deal with him for X, Y, and z reason. But that's basically how I'm looking at things. You know what I mean? That's how I define elite. Getting back to your question, you're not elite if you're bowing and scraping and compromising yourself. You're not elite if you can only be strong because somebody is weak looking at you white people.
If you're only strong because you keep other people subordinated, you're not strong.
And if your eliteness is based on this, then what are we even talking about? And that's why now, you see, I dress like this.
I go to the office and I'm like, Yo, if we're not talking about what I bring to the table, we're not talking about anything. Because I got a degree in diplomacy. If I wanted to be a diplomat, I'd have took the Foreign Service Officer test and went into the Foreign Service and been a diplomat. I'm here to do this job, not go round and around with anybody, be they in my race or otherwise. And I think to your point or to your question, when we talk about what elite is, we need to define that. And we need to appreciate how these past traumas that have not been dealt with tie into the ways in which we operate without having defined our terms and operate in some truly problematic ways.
When we really get at that and address those traumas, we'll realize that we have more bandwidth and more margin of maneuver to get free, as it were, than we previously thought.
Man, we just felt that my.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: Conversations like these again, this is a freaking rabbit hole. Because just being black in America is just being black in America.
It's just so much. But then when you break down how our society moves, there's a show that just came out.
It's called the Gilded Age, lord. It's on HBO. That show has just kind of taken me aback just looking at it in we we've seen things like Bridgerton and how Shonda Rhimes kind of did that, kind of diversifying what that looks like. But even watching a show like that and just looking at just looking at the black people itself and trying to find diversity.
I read an article recently on the Reboot. It wasn't Sex in the City, it's called, and just Like that and how they talked about how diverse it was and even Megan McCain's response about diversity. And it's just so much through the lens of the conservative, and it's just a mean but this is just a freaking rabbit hole. And it's just caused so much issues, so much grief. But if we're looking at grief as not relinquishing our joy and trying to maintain our joy, knowing what we're living in, not forgetting and allowing yourself to be angry when you want to be angry, to be sad when you want to be sad, how how can we use this constant grieving process?
Although some of us may not look at it as grief, but that's what it is. It's grief, the absence of joy. But how can we move forward? What ways do you think that we can move forward to keep our history alive, to remain intentional in what we're doing?
To allow the grief to kind of shape some type of positive thoughts, provoke positive things in our culture? How can we do that? What do you think about that?
[00:49:38] Speaker B: I'm going to drop this on you and then I'm going to run out the door because I don't know when they saw me walk up out that office.
You know what I would say is, again, grief is the absence of joy.
And joy is completely at your discretion because joy is not circumstantial.
What that means is you can set boundaries within yourself.
It's your boat. You can design your boat however you want to make sure that the water doesn't get out. If you decide not to design your boat a certain way, you can put in whatever process that you want to get that water out of your boat. When it does get in, you're going to get splashed. You know what I'm saying?
There's no getting away from the water because you're surrounded by it.
But your design and your process is completely up to you. So I would say have a design and have a process and we focus a lot on both of those things. I think in the present era when you hear people talking about life design, what they're talking about is situating their life in such a way that the world has minimal opportunity to disturb their joy, to intrude upon their joy because it's going to disturb your joy, but to effectively intrude upon your joy. When we talk about therapy, what we're talking about is the processes by which we get the water out of our boat and folks are leaning in one direction or the other, but it's a mix of the two. You need to figure out what that mix looks like for you and then you need to figure out what the particulars of each component of that mix are and then you need to work your process. That's literally all it is. Like set boundaries. That's why we're seeing now things that people think look unhealthy. But actually aren't we're seeing the younger set say to the elders, look, you out of pocket, you're not eldering, right?
So I need to set this boundary, you know what I mean? And so that's basically what I would say.
You don't have to constantly be grieving. People are going to constantly come at you. But if it becomes a game of oh, I see you, but I'm ready, I got this pump ready, that water is coming out of my boat. I know it's going storm, but I know it's going storm, but I'm already ready for that. Right then you're halfway there. Of course there are times, and I know I'm beating the hell out of this analogy right now, but when the storm that you get hit with is not the one that you expected, but you still have something. And that's better than being out there completely unprepared or just being out there with one bucket trying to bail your ship out, right?
That's what I would say, man.
You can't focus on what they're doing.
You need to understand what they're doing. But you can't live in that place.
And that is the long and short of it.
Know what you're going to be hit with as best as possible.
Learn from every interaction, from every experience and after every experience, make your life design and your therapy practices better and you just keep on pushing.
And as much as we can still, because we are losing a lot of our history, reach back to those examples of true black excellence, that is, people who found a way to move through this life, not corrupted by this life, let's put it that way and incorporate some of those practices into your situation.
See if you can move through this place of this era of Neo or I guess I should call it crypto racism without becoming a Neo token and still put forward the sort of work if you can move through. This new era of crypto racism without becoming a neo token and still put forth the sort of cultural product or have the communal impact that a Maya Angelou or a Malcolm X or shit, Mr. King, from your neighborhood that ran the barber shop then you won. That's the real black excellence.
Black excellence isn't getting a little bit of money looking non threatening to white folks and being loved by folks that ain't your community.
Black excellence is being objectively excellent, doing something for your family, doing something for your community, and then doing something for whoever else comes after that family.
[00:55:37] Speaker C: I would like for you to consider, how can you keep your rich history alive? How can you use the grief of our culture for good and keep it intentional?
Happiness is circumstantial, joy isn't. And remember, you don't know where you're going if you don't know where you came from. You might join in grieving, but you're going to come out healed. I love you and thank you.
