Episode 16 Featuring Rev. Kristen John Foy

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Dear America, where your voice matters and every
vote counts.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Join us as we.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Explore the power of black and brown communities in shaping
our future.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
It's time to make your mark.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
And be heard.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hello world, this is Dear America with Chanel Barnes, and
we are focused on interviewing folks who represent the pulse
of our nation. I am so thrilled and excited to
be sitting here with Elder Foy, who has joined us
as one of our founding guests. Did you realize that
you're one of our founding members?

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Honored man, Guy? Very appreciative of the opportunity to help
you break in this new space.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Absolutely, But we have a lot to cover, so I'm
just gonna jump right in if that's okay.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Tell me a little bit.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
About your experience in both activism and politics and how
some of your personal experiences have shaped your understanding of
politics and of economic justice.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I am born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, in
a multi racial household. Growing up in the late in
the mid eighties, it was a different place then you
find New York City to be today, in Brooklyn in particular,
and much of my worldview was formed by their environment

(01:22):
growing up. Poverty, violence, and racism framed much of my passion.
Growing up with a black father from the South and
a white mother from New York City, I got to
see how the world views me through their experiences. So

(01:45):
when I was with my father, I got to see
one view of the world. When I was with my mother,
it was something it was something else, and the dichotomy
was disturbing. It was you know, when you're a black
man in America, you have one experience, and you know
a white woman in America you have another. And so

(02:06):
you know, that was I think very impactful to see
the difference and how the world treated both my parents
and when we were all together, it was a totally
different experience. I can I recall a story. We were
all going on vacation. I was probably nine ten years old.

(02:29):
My sister is four years younger than me, and we
were all in a car in Hawley, Pennsylvania, which is
northeastern Pennsylvania, and it was we were pulling into the
town late at night, and my father's driving and then
he brings the car to a slow stop and he says, oh, yeah,

(02:50):
I won't.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Use the exploitition. I think we got it, Yeah, we
got it.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
In turns of my mother and she says what John,
And then my sister and I are sitting in a
back seat, and then it's a flood of ginheads and
white supremacists surround the car. But they've all tatted up
with these you know, you know, swatstickers and gothic crosses.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
And how old are you at this point?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
I'm you know, nine ten, maybe a little younger. And
I didn't know exactly what I was seeing and what
we are experiencing. What I could tell from you know,
my parents' reaction that it was not good. And then
they start peering into the car and my mother grabs
my father, I remember this this very starkly grabs my

(03:41):
father's arm and says, oh, John, and he says, it's okay,
calm down, it's okay. Let's just everything will be fine,
Everything will be fine. And they're all peering in the
car and then they start getting you know, louder and louder,
and they just walk off and leave us. But that
that memory, they left they left nothing. Thank god, we

(04:04):
were you know, we werecovered. He had his angels around us.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
But I can imagine the fear though the.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Fear, but I did not. I didn't know, you know,
what was happening. I later found out, you know, my
parents explained what the you know, what the fear and
the concern was and why, and it was it's a
it's a memory that I carry. I'm almost fifty years
old now. I remember it as it as if it

(04:32):
were yesterday. And my mother's reaction, which was far more
fearful than my father's reaction. You know, black man from
the South. That was not his first experience, right, so
he he had been tempered by his past, but it
was it was it was my first experience, you know,
being on the other side.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
You know.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
She she grew up in you know, a privileged household
and in New York and the you know, and I
won't give away her age, but it wasn't she wouldn't
respect mom, mom, mom. You know, she grew up in
a time in New York where it wasn't as diverse,

(05:15):
and so this was a new experience for her. And
you know, afterwards, they tried to explain, in the best
way they could to to a young kid, why you
should be concerned when you see folks who appear.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
That way or who and this is an introduction for you.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
This was an introduction. This was an introduction to just
very overt white nationalism.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Now, I had.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Experienced subtle racism in New York, you know, being with
my father traveling, or you know, going to a restaurant,
you know, waiting an exorbitant amount of time to get served.
You know, those kinds of you know, microaggressions as we
recognize them now. But that was the darkest experience I

(06:02):
had had with white supremacy up until that point.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
I have to ask, if you don't mind, we I
like for us to go deep on this show.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Would you say that that was your first introduction to America.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
I would say that was my first introduction to the
dark side of America.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Okay, you still have hope. I doubt I'm here.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
Well, yeah, it's because I know the price that was
paid and the blood that was shed, and so I'm
not willing to concede that this country isn't ours. I'm
not willing to walk away from America's promise because of
America's past. We all have a past, whether we're individuals

(06:45):
or we're nations. And the test of greatness is whether
you are able to press beyond the past and realize
and realize your promise. America still has a lot of
growing to do. But I would say that was my first,
my first confrontation with the dark side of America, and

(07:08):
I was determined not to accept that as a reality
for myself my family. I certainly did not want to
concede that we didn't have power to change that. Even
as a young kid, I was always ambitious in that regard,
looking for the better angels of our nature, and so

(07:34):
I was, you know, my I think my ambitions and
my dreams were crystallized in that moment. Absolutely, this cannot
be what defines the rest of our lives. And so,
you know, if I had to trace all of my
activism and all of my basically all of my professional

(07:54):
life back to a single moment, it would be that
night in Holy Pennsylvania where we were confronted by white
supremacy and it's rorst in its rorist form, and a
civil rights activist was born out of it.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
I love that there's so much conversation right now in
the news.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
I think about.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
What it means for someone to be interracial, what it
means for someone to decide to identify if they so choose.
Can you talk to me a little bit about that
experience for you, as someone who has just identified as
someone who is interracial? How does that play out for
you as you grow into America.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
So I identify, let me be clear, I identify as
a black male. Okay, my racial background is diverse, but
my social experience, my cultural preferences are black. I love
black culture, I love black music, I love black people.

(08:58):
You know my mother, this family was a lot smaller
numerically and influentially. I was raised mostly by my father's
side of the family. We had interaction with my mother's side,
but you know, strong black women, Yes, you know. My
father's mother was Nana. She was the matriarch of the family.

(09:20):
She had six children, four boys and two girls. They
were all married and we had a big family, a
tight knit family, a loving family, a strong family. We
were confronted by many challenges, external and internal, as every
other family is. But my grooming, so to speak, by

(09:46):
life was mostly done by the black side of my family.
And so I identify as a black male mostly because
of my upbringing. But society has also decided to impose
its view upon me. And I accept it.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Some people say we shouldn't even be having this conversation,
We shouldn't be thinking about identity in this way. Do
you agree with that or do you disagree with that?

Speaker 1 (10:13):
I disagree with it. I think diversity is good. I think,
you know, in the grand scheme of things, humanity is
a conglomeration of thousands of various cultures and languages and genes,
and the best of humanity is an amalgamation of all

(10:34):
of us. But we've got some purging to do, yes, right,
We've got some purging of preconceived notions of biases. We've
got some purging to do of hate of you. Privileged corrupts, yes,
and it creates and incentivizes people to look at themselves

(10:57):
differently and to for how they look. And so we've
got we've got to confront that head on. We've got
to dismantle structures that perpetuate bias, you know, across generations,
and systems that perpetuate in undergird bias and white supremacy

(11:19):
and privilege across generations. But when we do that hard work,
we get to see a real benefit, not just for
us as individuals or for society as a whole, but
we get to see how it impacts the future. You
get to you know, hindsight is twenty twenty. Where would

(11:41):
we be today without folks like you know, doctor King
and JFK. Where would we be without without people pressing
beyond what is comfortable into what is necessary? Which is
hard conversation, it's hard action. You know, you don't change

(12:02):
hearts and minds merely by words. You change them with action.
You change them with deeds. Some of those deeds and
actions are confrontational and some of them are collaborative and engaging.
But it takes the combination of the two to really
transform the soul of an individual or nation. And I'm

(12:25):
committed to that hard work.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
Let's go there, Elder Foyd.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
You talked a bit just now about what I'm hearing
is systematic racism. How we break through that? Can you
explain what systematic racism is? I want to break it
down for those who may be hearing it but don't
actually understand what that is and how that plays a
role in how America is shaped.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
So, systematic racism or institutional racism are systems, institutions, governments,
corporations that whose culture are framed by laws which segregate
and separate individuals and provide a distinction in privilege, access,

(13:17):
and opportunity. You know, racism isn't just some esoteric thing
in the ether. It is undergirded by law, It is
undergirded by history. It is undergirded by institutions whose purpose
was to keep one group of people in a superior

(13:38):
social position, economic position, political position, cultural position at the
expense of another group of people. And So, whether we're
talking about chattel slavery, which we've experienced in the Americas,
or we're talking about you know, Jim Crow, or we're
talking about women's suffrage, we are talking about laws which

(14:04):
whose purpose is to create a distinction between individuals and
a lot certain individuals greater access and greater opportunities at
the expense of other individuals. So, to break that down
even more basically, policing.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
I was going to go there. Let's go there, let's
go there.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Policing in America. If you are affluent, if you are white,
you have one experience with police, which shapes your worldview
with respect to law enforcement. If you are a personal color,
if you're black, if you're poor, you have another experience

(14:48):
with police, and then you come to recognize and realize
that the intent of that institution is to maintain the disparity,
to maintain the wall, to build the wall, and it's
to stand on the wall.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
You know.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Policing in America has a has assorted history. It started
out as as a group of folks whose purpose was
to track runaway slaves and bring them back to the plantation,
to cross county lines and state lines, identify who who

(15:27):
was supposed to be in chains, and bring them back
to that position. That's where policing began in this country.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
It is a different.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
It evolved in the sense that it took on a
broader role of now crime, not not preventing crime, but
reacting to it and really maintaining the line between so
called civil society and the rest of us, the impoverished society,

(16:04):
the impoverished nation. The police maintain order for people who
have at the expense of those who do not have.
Their job is to protect individuals and property. Well, if
you were an individual who happened to be property, your
job was to maintain that social order. If you're an

(16:27):
individual who owns property, your job is to protect that
property and that individual at the expense of those who
do not own property or do not have the economic wherewithal.
And so policing evolved from chasing down runaway slaves to
maintaining a social order that is predicated on white supremacy.

(16:52):
And so it has evolved in that sense, but the
mission is still the same, right, The mission is to
maintain the social order, and the social order is one
of in this country, white supremacy. We have a moral
obligation to speak to that truth and then to act
to change that truth. You know, I get to arguments

(17:16):
all the time with a lot of my activists, colleagues
and cohorts. You know, in the aftermath of George Floyd,
we saw this nation rise up and confront white supremacy
in a way it had never done before and put
policing in dead center of the national discourse around racism

(17:37):
and race relations, and really highlight how policing in this
country is an institutional barrier for both progress. It is
also an institutional weapon to keep the to maintaining the
social order of white supremacy in this world.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
I just watched, unfortunately, a young black man, he was
be in to death by several police officers. We've seen
it with George Floyd, We've seen it with Breonna Taylor.
We see this happening. But I think people get together,
they go and they you know, they riot, and we

(18:15):
speak out. But I think people are still feeling a
bit helpless about what exactly they can do in order
to impact the system to make it more equitable. What
are your thoughts for people who are still feeling very
helpless and thinking about this overall system.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, you're not powerless, and you're not powerless because even
in the context of white supremacy, individuals, collectives have power.
There's power in numbers. People of like mind and good
conscience can get together, can organize, can influence policy, can
influence economics, can influence culture in a way that can

(18:58):
transform the system and can transform these institutions. And so
as long as you are committed, along with other like
minded people to transforming a situation, you have the power
to do it. We are in a capitalist society, so
money helps, yes, But black folks have over a trillion

(19:19):
dollars worth of disposable income in this country. If we
were ever to all get on the same page about
how to use that money to leverage our freedom, we'd
be a lot farther down the road than we are.
We have political power. We elect people up and down

(19:40):
the ballot. We elect people from the federal government on
down to the micro level of school boards. If we
were ever to formulate a collective agenda about how to
leverage all of the political power we have, we could
see a lot more progress than we've seen.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
If you were talking with so one who was new
to voting, how would you actually concretely explain to them
how their vote impacts the policing and the overall police system.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
I'd give them. I mean, there's several examples. First, I'd
like to make a distinction. Within the concept of a
construct of political power, you have electoral power, which is voting,
and you have other constructs of political power like protest movements,
right marching, boycotting, engaging in math, mobilization of individuals around

(20:37):
a particular issue. Voting is one where it's very clear.
And I like to use this analogy. If you want
to buy a car, say the car is fifty thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
That's a good car. That's a good good car.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
You've got a mass enough individual dollars to be able
to afford that fifty thousand dollars. Car voting is the
same thing. If you've got a dollar and I've got
a dollar, all we need is forty nine nine hundred
and ninety eight other people with a dollar, and when
we can buy that car voting, it's the same premise.

(21:17):
It is the exercise of a particular kind of your
individual power. And when enough of us exercise that individual
power collectively, we can attain power, obtain power. We can
elect people who make decisions about how dollars are spent,

(21:37):
about how resources are deployed, about how institutions are formed
and reformed, about how systems are formed and reformed. I
don't subscribe to this notion that we should all be
part of one particular party or another. I happen to
be a Democrat, but I think our power political power,

(21:59):
has has been framed in that partisan through that partisan
lens for far too long. And so what we've done
is we've put all our hopes in one particular basket,
and when that basket doesn't deliver, then we throw the
baby out with the bath woad, and we say there's
nothing here for us. And that's just not true if
you look at other communities besides the African American community

(22:25):
or the Black American community. They have diversity of political
thought and political action. There's no community in America that
achieves economic, social, or political maturity by all being herded
over here with one monolithic opinion about how to approach
solving problems. I happen to be a progressive, but I

(22:49):
get along very well with Black conservatives, and I think
there's a space for Black conservatism. I think there is
a space for for us to be at every Taskee
if we believe we're supposed to be at every table,
and that's really how you make change before.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
We go to the party line. Because I think that's interesting.
I love to get your perspective there. You gave the
thought of, you know, just an estimate of fifty thousand people.
If fifty thousand people came together, imagine what we could do.
Where I'm from, I know a mayor who got elected
with only six hundred votes and is now serving a

(23:30):
population of people.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
What do you say to the lack of voter participation.
The lack of.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Voter participation is symptomatic and emblematic of an apathy that
is born out of deprivation. Economic deprivation, political deprivation, deprivation
of opportunity. And when people don't see what they're getting
for their money or they're getting for their vote, they say,

(23:59):
why waste it? I try not to judge the apathy.
We have to address it. And so people who do
not participate in the political the electoral process, but spend
their money in that same system, People who use services
public services in that same system, People who either benefit

(24:24):
from a particular policy or institution need to recognize that
in order for them to continue to access those resources,
access those institutions, they need to ensure that the people
who reflect their values have the power to make decisions

(24:44):
over that institution and over that system. We can't disaggregate
our economic power and our political power. They go hand
in hand. The political power is born out of economic power.
It's an extension of economic power. And as long as
you participate in an economy, you have you short change

(25:04):
yourself if you're not participating in the political process which
undergirds and supports and frames that economy. And giving your
vote is not a gift. Giving your vote is consuming,
It is consuming an agenda, it is consuming a set
of values. And we've got to do. We've got to

(25:27):
do that part too. We've got to make we've got
to do hard work to change our we can abdicate
our responsibility for change to everybody else and then sit
back and complain about it. You know, if you you know,
a vote is not an emotional decision. It's a business decision.
It's about what's in your best interest economically, politically, socially, culturally.

(25:49):
It's not about how you feel today. It's about are
you willing to act in your own best interests? And
when you when you start to have these conversations and
you peel back and know, you get to the heart
of why people are not voting, and you start to
peel back the nonsense and peer through the fact that
people just they don't want to be You know, some

(26:11):
people say, I don't want to be suckered, right, I
don't want to I don't want to be lied to.
And because they're all liars and they they say one
thing and they do the other, and that that that
that may be true in many instances, but when you
don't participate, you really have no voice.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
And as I appreciate this, I feel like you and
I could go on for a long time having his conversation,
and I would welcome you back for a part two,
especially as we get into the next few months, just
to bring all of this together. We've talked about a
lot here. We've talked about racial discrimination, We've talked about policing,

(26:51):
We've talked about voting and civic engagement. If there's one
takeaway you want for our audience to take from this conversation,
what would that one takeaway be? In one sentence, act
one word.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Act, Act in your own self interest, Act in the
interest of the people you love and you care about,
Act in the interest of your community, Act in the
interest of your values.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
Act.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Don't talk, don't pontificate, don't think about it, don't analyze
it to death.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Act.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Once you've made a decision, you got to act on it,
otherwise you waste it all that time. Act, whether that
action is voting or marching, spending or withholding your dollar.
Withholding your dollar is also an act. Part to running
to be the person you want to see. If who
you see out there is not doing it for you,

(27:44):
then do it for yourself. Maybe somebody is looking for
you to be that person, and you certainly have an
obligation not just to yourself, but to your community and
to future generations. To act on your own apathy, to
act on your own disdain for the system. If you
are turned off, then you've got to act to turn
it on for somebody else.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
I love that and with that, America, This is Dear
America with Chanelle Barnes, and we thank you so so
much for coming on as one of our founding guests.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
This has been a Project Ready production.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
To learn more and effect change, log onto Project readyenja
dot org or listen anytime on all major podcast carriers