Tap In: Imma Roast the Hell Out of Lt. Gov. Beckwith

Last week, lieutenant governor Micah Beckwith of Indiana, in defense of SB 289, attempted to redefine the 3/5th compromise as something that was not about slavery. NOT ON MY WATCH!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Media. What up, y'all, Let me tap in with you
right quick. This week's going to be a little meta,
a little personal, because in a lot of ways, I

(00:23):
take this personal. Last week a lieutenant governor, for which
maybe two of y'all care about, but it's important for
meta purposes. Micah Beckwick leaned up against his little desk
and is strangely fitting Khakis to give a little debriefing
following what had to have been quite the ownage by

(00:44):
the Democratic senators in their state debate around Senate Bill
two eighty nine, which is called the Unlawful Discrimination Bill
for the State of Indiana. Apparently, somebody in that discussion
that was clearly televised, somebody brought up the three fifths compromise,
to which this man actually fixed his tiny little lips

(01:05):
to make an argument that the three fits compromise was
not about slavery. Oh, Dilbert looking ass already know this
man's tender profile picture as him holding a fish within
reflective sunglasses. I already know this man daughter cuss at
him with her whole chest. Anyway, three fits compromise was
not about slavery. Apparently, Now that's quite a take, a

(01:28):
take for which no one at the time would have
accepted as to be true, but nonetheless is being borrowed
to try to defend this centin bill that is just
so important to him. Now, obviously, anti discrimination can invoke
a certain assumption about what it's about. But if you
have been living in this country during this timeline, you

(01:50):
would understand that a lot of these things that present
themselves of anti discrimination are quite discriminatory. This one is
a continuation of rolling back any sort of diversity or
inclusion or consideration of differences when onboarding to a particular institution,
whatever that institution may be. But that's not the point

(02:12):
of this tap in. Now. If you want to go
back to the Lost Cause series, or even me talking
about the Electoral College and the Three Phish Compromise and
what that had to do with voting rights, and still
the idea that like African Americans who are enslaved are
three fits humans because baked into the very concept of

(02:32):
the Three Phish compromise myth that somehow Africans are subhuman.
But let's set that aside for a second. Let me
talk to you about this. If you've lived long enough,
if it has not happened already, it's going to happen
to you very soon. You're going to be faced with
a moment where your lived experience with a person, or
a community of people, or a part on the planet

(02:56):
somehow or another, your lived experience which you are curly
witnessing and experiencing, will come in stark contrast to the
worldview for which you were taught, the way for which
you understood physics work. When you're experiencing something or someone that,
metaphorically speaking, according to the laws of physics that you
were given or made to believe that governs the universe,

(03:18):
this person, this experience should not exist. What do I
mean by that? Like, maybe you were taught something about
black people or the Latino community, or queer people or
people other religions. You were taught that these people were
the untouchables, or there was something particularly wrong with you,
something particularly different from them, something for which that you

(03:39):
needed to stay away from because it's going to pervert
the perfection of the world you're trying to exist in.
And then you meet one and they break all the rules,
you realize, oh, yeah, they're regular people, just like just
like you are. Or there's another situation where you may
have been taught that I don't know, people are just
generally good and things just work out, and you know,

(04:01):
if you work hard. The meritocracy myth. You work hard,
you do your best, you keep your nose clean, and
everything works out. And then you grow up and you realize, oh, no,
life is not fair at all. People hustle other people.
Your face with a moment that I talked about in
terror form in my poetry book Building a Liverabo World,
where we talked about like the possibilities of reality is
far crazier than you can imagine. There's a procrypal story

(04:24):
about I don't know, some astrophysicist von Kleigan whatever, like's
not his name's not the point He asked him about
why Copernicus was so epic and life changing to everyone.
Copernicus the guy who said that the Earth revolves around
the sun. He asked one of his students, like, why
was that so crazy? Because it's like, well, because it

(04:45):
don't look like it when you look in the sky
it looked like the sun is moving. Because that's crazy. Well,
what would it look like if it looked like the
Earth was revolving around the sun. An answer is this,
it would look the way it does look. It's just
you're faced with a dilemma. You either change. You either

(05:07):
accept the reality of what you're looking at because it's
what you're looking at, or you deny what you're looking
at and you hold on to the way for which
you thought about. The world works a lot of you,
especially because I meet you out and about, whether it's
through my music, my poetry, my books, or the podcast.
A lot of y'all come from faith based backgrounds, and

(05:27):
you have made it clear to me how thankful you
are to my music or my work because maybe my albums,
maybe a line in a poem or interview was the first,
like scratching the black paint that let light in that
you really understood that, like maybe the world is far
bigger than the cup for which you were given to contain.

(05:48):
That world started you on this path of inclusion, you know,
to think of the world differently, to experience the world
that you're actually experiencing. I've had those moments myself health
growing up in a church, going Bible, believe in black home,
and then you sit across the table, you go to
dinner with a Muslim family, or you make some queer

(06:09):
friends and you're like, well, I'll be damn, I thought
about this all wrong. A lot of us respond different
ways to that realization, to that moment in our lives.
And I know a lot of people that listen to
this show in the Bastard Show or expangelical or deconstructed, etc.
And You're like, what do I do with this frustration,
with this misinformation? I was given rage, get angry. Yeah,

(06:32):
I understand about I understand that I've done the same.
I try to think about the intentions of those people
who taught me these things. Some of them honestly didn't
know better. Some of them thought they were doing the
best they could. They're speaking out of their own brokenness.
But sometimes, oh they knew they was wrong. They knew
what they was trying to do. This governor knows what

(06:55):
the fuck he's doing. I don't believe this is your
third grade teacher teaching you about column I been selling
The Ocean Blue in fourteen ninety two. I don't think
this is your summer camp who try to reenact the
first Thanksgiving. These are hundreds and hundreds of years later. Now,
while these people are not exonerated, i e. They are

(07:16):
perpetuating a institutional racism that is easily with the slightest
of google could be fixed. They continue to perpetuate it. However,
I still think it's different than what this governor is.
But the people that invented those stories, they knew what
the fuck they was doing. My brain goes to the

(07:37):
fact that I hate that people have to unlearn anything.
Why couldn't we have just been given the truth wards
and all maybe learn from our own mistakes. So me,
I feel like part of my life's work, my calling,
if you will, is I want to make sure, to
the best of my ability that I limit the amount
of unlearning the next gen has to do. And sometimes
that's me doing my due diligence, and other times that's

(07:58):
me meeting these fools in the streets calling bullshit cap ass,
bullshit cap when it's time to mocking and roasting with
all the ability that the ancestors has passed down to
me as a black man, I'm gonna roast the hell
out of this government because sometimes I feel like, if
you're don roast the hell out of these cornballs, if
you don't meet them immediately, would let me stop you

(08:19):
right there, playboy? And maybe I'm not gonna convince everybody,
but you gonna get this work then something like the
three fisths compromise, which we all know clearly and there's
time to fix this. That what he is saying is
absolute bullshit. For the record, his argument was that it
was not discriminatory. It was an attempt to compromise between

(08:39):
the colonies to make sure that everybody had a fair
shake in the powers, in the legislative powers as they
casted their vote, so that the North wouldn't always win
because although the South had more people, the South didn't
allow those people to vote. Those people, according to the Constitution,
were three fifths. So just like how the Confederacy was

(09:01):
about stage rights, the three fish Compromise is about fairness.
But his argument is that it's woke DEI that has
taught you that the three fifths compromise is about racist
slavery practices. Now, how wild as that sounds, right now,
give it fifty years, give it one hundred years, Just

(09:22):
like how wild the idea that Columbus in fourteen ninety
two was the first European to get here. I don't
understand how you could be the first person at a
place that people already live at, and not only that
it's already white people here then too, man, what the
hell is you talking about? It seems silly now, don't it.
But also, like we said in the Lost Cause episodes,

(09:46):
history is about the past, but memories about the future.
We remember things wrong all the time. But when things
are communicated to you so that you'll remember them wrongly,
you have to ask yourself who gains from this re
who loses from this reshaping? Because if you are trying
to reshape and re remember the past in a way

(10:07):
for which erases the warts, oh, then we're talking about
a zero sum situation. My encouragement to you all on
this tap in is when these people are playing in
your face, when they are trying to tell you that
up is down and the sky is purple, roast the
hell out of these people. Tap in, y'all,