EP15: Anti-Blackness

In this episode of FARSIGHT Chats, hosted by Farah Bala, special guests Shanya Cordis, Taylor Dews, Tori Jackson, and Indie Johnson engage in an in-depth conversation on Anti-Blackness. The episode delves into the historical and contemporary implications of Anti-Blackness in society, particularly through the lens of microaggressions and systemic biases. Each guest shares their lived experiences and academic perspectives, addressing how Anti-Blackness intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and colorism. They highlight the need for both personal introspection and systemic change, emphasizing the importance of artistic expression and rigorous storytelling in advancing an inclusive and equitable society. The discussion also calls for more intentional efforts from non-Black and White communities to address and dismantle Anti-Blackness through critical examination, accountability, and active engagement in anti-racist work.

| KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED |

Understanding Anti-Blackness:

• The conversation defines anti-Blackness as systemic, global, and deeply ingrained, manifesting in everyday micro-aggressions and institutional inequities.

Intersectionality:

• The guests highlight how anti-Blackness interacts with other identities such as gender, sexuality, and indigeneity, affecting individuals differently based on their intersectional experiences.

Personal Experiences:

• Each guest shares personal stories to illustrate the ways anti-Blackness has shaped their lives, including experiences with colorism, trans identity, and societal expectations.

Global and Structural Perspectives:

• The discussion contextualizes anti-Blackness as a foundational aspect of social structures in the U.S. and beyond, emphasizing the need to challenge systemic inequalities.

Art and Advocacy:

• The guests explore the role of art in dismantling anti-Blackness, calling for authentic storytelling, freedom of expression, and critical examination of who funds and produces artistic works.

Call to Action:

• The episode urges individuals, especially non-Black audiences, to engage in self-reflection, education, and unlearning, emphasizing that combating anti-Blackness requires systemic change and accountability.

| SHOW NOTES |

00:00 Introduction to FARSIGHT Chats

00:45 Exploring Anti-Blackness

02:23 Meet the Guests

05:56 Personal Experiences with Anti-Blackness

19:31 Intersectionality and Anti-Blackness

24:49 Colorism and Anti-Blackness

33:50 Navigating Multiple Identities

39:22 Choices and Systemic Myths

40:18 Living in Intersections

42:25 Unlearning Anti-Blackness

44:48 The Role of Education

46:31 Individual and Structural Work

47:18 Accountability and Action

01:02:42 Artistic Spaces and Anti-Blackness

01:03:28 The Importance of Diverse Storytelling

01:13:20 Funding and Audience Dynamics

01:13:37 Final Reflections and Gratitude

| WORKS CITED |

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman. Book.

Anti-Blackness books by Frank B Wilderson III. Books (3).

Connect with our guests:

• Shanya Cordis, Ph.D | Anthropologist & Professor, Columbia University

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Farsight Chats, your guideto navigating complex and important
conversations on society and culture.
I'm your host, Farah Bala,founder and CEO of Farsight.
We specialize in leadership andorganizational development, focusing
on equity, diversity, and inclusionas core leadership competencies.

(00:22):
Join us in these conversationsthat aim to foster understanding,
growth, and positive change.
On today's episode, Anti Blackness,we are joined by special guests,
Shania Cordes, Taylor Dews,Tori Jackson, and Indie Johnson.
We originally recordedthis on March 8th, 2024.

(00:45):
This episode explores the term antiBlackness, which centers the Black
experience of oppression and erasure.
Anti Blackness shows up todayas microaggressions at work, or
more explicitly, within society.
It is crucial to understandthe history behind the anti
Black rhetoric and actions.
Or else, Black leaders, no matter howhigh their qualifications, will continue

(01:09):
to be unfairly held to higher standardsthan their colleagues and peers.
If you recall the unconscious biasepisode we did with Harvard researchers,
you will remember them talking aboutthe bias of skin color, which is the
preference of light skin over darkskin, that exists on a global level.
So while this conversationspecifically centers on the

(01:30):
anti Black experience from a U.
S.
perspective, it is important toacknowledge that the concept of anti
Blackness does exist on a global level.
through the term colorism, which isdiscrimination based on skin color and
a form of prejudice in which those whoshare similar ethnic traits are treated
differently, based on social implicationsthat come with cultural meanings

(01:53):
attached to their darker skin color.
as you listen in today, we inviteyou to consider what patterns
have you recognized of anti Blackthinking and actions within yourself?
How might anti Blackness affectthose within your inner circle?
And how do you center the Blackexperience in your everyday interactions?

(02:16):
Join us on this journey oflearning and unlearning in
today's episode of Farsight Chats.
I want to start off by thanking eachof our guests here, Shania, Tori, Indy,
Taylor, thank you so much for takingthe time to join us for this very
robust, very powerful conversation andimportant conversation on anti Blackness.

(02:39):
I'm really glad that we have thisgroup to have this conversation with.
I'm going to hand it over to you toplease introduce yourselves to us.
And tell us what you do.
My name is Shania Cordes.
I go by she, her, hers.
I'm a professor at Columbia University,and I work at the intersections of
anthropology, Black Studies, andNative American and Indigenous Studies.

(03:01):
And so more broadly, I am lookingat questions of Black and Indigenous
communities, their social movements,political struggles, here in the U.
S., but in the Americas more broadly.
I also am a writer, I'm a poet.
And so those works also explore similarthemes of blackness and indigeneity.
And so I'm really happy to bein conversation with everyone.

(03:22):
I'm Tori Jackson.
I'm an artist activist.
I'm the co founder of Alabama IndigenousCoalition, which is a organization
where we we educate communities acrossthe state of Alabama and the Southeast.
And we try to kind ofdismantle whitewashed native
and black native history.
And I am also on the SDEC.

(03:44):
I am the first person to holdthe position of the vice chair
on the Native American Caucus.
First, first black native and firstnative without tribal membership.
Hi, everybody.
My name is Indy Johnson.
I am an artist as well.
I am also a creator of sorts whenit comes to curating experiences

(04:07):
for my community members.
I'm currently the creativedirector of the Harvest Cabaret
stationed in Atlanta, Georgia.
I have been a writer for a few years now.
I mean my whole life, but I'mgetting more into like my writing
bag of creating scripts and writing.

(04:28):
You know, features, so this is avery exciting opportunity to share
thoughts with you all in here.
All of your experiences around this topic.
I'm really excited.
My name is Taylor dues.
I am a 2nd year PhD student at NYU andtheir Department of cultural anthropology.
I'm also there getting acertificate in culture and media.

(04:50):
So working on or eventually workingtowards a dissertation and a film project.
My research looks at Black internationalfilm festivals as sites of African
diasporic cultural encounter andspecifically Black film festivals led
and directed by Black women and lookingat how Black women are at the center of

(05:10):
creating spaces for Black subjectivity.
And for a cross cultural kinship.
And these are also things I'm interestedin as it relates to my film work
and documentary, documentary work.
But I'm also interested in documenting,like, the Black quotidian, everyday
Black life and looking at my ownfamily histories through, through film.

(05:32):
I am also an alumna of SpelmanCollege which is an HBCU, all
girls HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia.
And that's where I hadShania Cordes as a professor.
And it's also where I, uh, I spent alot of time being a scholar activist
and working around food insecurity andhousing insecurity that students face.

(05:53):
Once again, excited to be here and excitedfor the conversation that we'll have.
My first question to each of you is,what is the lens through which you
come to this topic of anti blacknessthrough your own lived experience
and through your own perspectives?
When it comes to anti Blackness, I'mcoming from it, I'm coming to it from,

(06:13):
like, an artist's perspective but alsoas a trans person being alienated in
certain groups You start to have adifferent understanding of anti blackness.
To be honest, I didn't understandthe concept until I moved out of
Texas, and I found myself in Georgia.

(06:36):
I went to a PWI, apredominantly white institution.
And at the time, I spent a lot of time Ispent a lot of time trying to kind of go
under the surface fly under the radar,just get your education, learn what you
need to learn, then kind of get out.
And so it was after I had movedthat I had a better understanding of

(06:59):
what I had experienced previously.
And that's because I joined a lotof organizing circles and I got
new language, like anti blackness.
structural based white supremacy beingable to, like, now name these things
that have always been a part of myexperience and in some ways kind of

(07:20):
infiltrated its way into my life.
and then in some other ways, I hadalready internalized anti blackness for
me is one of those things that I do feelI have internalized it in some ways.
I think just about everybody hasbecause it is made as an infection.
It is something that issymptomatic of the greater white

(07:44):
supremacist network that exists.
It's that plagues the globe.
It's not just America.
especially when you think aboutcolonization and what it meant to give
up your own culture and then be forcedinto someone else's culture, then
that become the dominating culture.
But then that dominating cultureis at the precipice of violence
and harm most of the time.

(08:04):
And so my understanding of antiblackness as an artist has been.
Narratives create art, or narratives,I'm sorry, influence life.
It's always like, is life creatingart or is it are imitating life
and they are like simpatico, right?

(08:25):
So what we see and what we experienceon the daily, what we consume as media
has an influence on our psyche, has aninfluence on the way we see ourselves,
has an influence on the way we seeother people, and then dictates behavior
when it comes to interacting withother demographics beyond Black people.
I have been trying to do the work oflearning to write new narratives that

(08:47):
dictate a different type of understandingof Black people, of queer people, of
trans people, of my own experiences, anddebunk some of those things for myself
so that I can internalize less and createa greater understanding of Black people.
Thank you.
For community of like what it reallymeans to be in community with somebody
what solidarity actually looks likebeing on the front lines and in the

(09:10):
trenches with the person to my rightto my left, working for a common goal.
I've come to the lens of anti blacknesssimilar to what you were sharing Indy.
I didn't necessarily have thelanguage or the vocabulary.
And so through a kind of sequence ofevents that through my kind of embodied
experiences as a Black and IndigenousWarolokono woman coupling that with

(09:33):
my journey through academia, right?
My journey to the dissertation, my journeyto PhD, I had no idea what research was.
I'm a first generation college student.
And so I'm learning all thisnew vocabulary to describe my
experiences and to describe the world.
And so there was like a series of, of whatI've called glitches in the matrix, right?

(09:58):
We, we come to understandthe world as naturalized.
as normalized, like this is just how itis, this is how it's supposed to function.
And there's these, these momentswhere you get to kind of peel
back and see what are some of theunderlying practices and logics.
that animate our world, right?

(10:18):
And so for me, you know, it was,it was definitely grad school.
It was definitely those experiencesof realizing that the knowledges
that my communities have asblack indigenous peoples were
not included in the canon, right?
They were not included in the canon ofanthropology and often had to have these
kind of peripheral, fields of studiesof black studies and native indigenous

(10:40):
studies, but never seen as central tohow we understand and produce knowledge.
And so that was a really deep insightfor me, but I think more importantly
for me is that I understand.
anti blackness again through a veryvisceral bodily experience and one

(11:00):
that I have witnessed in relation tofolks in my communities in relation
to folks in my family that is reallyabout not just Not having access to
education or health or you know, theseother kind of institutional spaces that
can grant grant you a certain levelof power, but also the reduction of

(11:20):
one's livelihood, the reductions ofone's ability to live and to thrive.
And so.
We can talk more about this.
I think it's really importantto reiterate that anti blackness
is is a global formation, right?
it works and function functions invery specific ways, depending on the

(11:41):
history of a context, the specificgeography, the kind of interactions
between groups, but it is fundamentallyone that is about ordering people.
Okay.
Thank you.
In relation to each other, and there'ssomething about anti blackness in
particular as a form of violencethat also can work as a form of
currency to which non black folk arealso able to have conditional forms.

(12:07):
of access to, you know, institutionalspaces, power, what have you.
But again, I want to, it's,it's conditional, it's premised
on another form of violence.
And so, kind of coming through theseseries of moments and realizing I want
to bring together these genealogiesof Black and Indigenous thought to
really problematize and center, um,Anti blackness and and we can delve

(12:34):
into that a little bit more deeply asto why I want to center anti blackness
instead of whiteness or white supremacyas we move through the conversation.
But that's that's my entry my forayinto this, this lens of anti blackness.
I think I was born black andanti blackness came to me.
It became a way throughwhich I experienced.

(12:55):
And view the world and also a wayin which the world experiences and
views me and views black people.
And of course it's, coming to antiblackness, the language, came through
various position, like positionalitiesthat I hold, identity locations that
I hold, whether that be me beingblack and from the south, um, and
from southern Virginia in particular.

(13:17):
Whether that be me coming from twoparents who also have that deep seated
experience of being from and of the South.
It comes from having experiences like,like Indy articulated in predominantly
white spaces that were where Iexperienced uh, very very deep seated

(13:38):
forms of racism whether that be beingtold to pick cotton or being given
fried chicken or witnessing friendsbeing called slaves or whether like the
confronting derogatory speech all ofthose things have colored my experience.
Um, my intimate, um, experience as,uh, Shania says with anti blackness.

(14:00):
And of course I would say that I'vealways been like a rebellious child.
I mean, I noticed anti blackness andimmediately like in middle school, I
was like anti blackness is worse enemy.
And so I've had like these moments, theselike radicalizing moments, whether that
be, I think for my generation, the murderof Trayvon Martin, and the, the, like,

(14:23):
quote unquote high profile murders thatThat followed, but then also the small
ones, the ones that were local the onesthat hit home as in, it was my family
or the ones that were my friends or myneighbor or my church member the ones that
didn't get widespread news, um, attention.
And then, and then I went to Spelman andI got the language to, to this radicalism

(14:45):
that I felt like within, within me andthis language, like, of anti Blackness
and of course now I've, I've gone through,I'm in graduate school now, and there is
this this compulsion to intellectualizethe experience of anti Blackness to
name it, anti Blackness, which has itsutility and its use, um, and it also
sometimes allows for us to remove itfrom ourselves or to create it into,

(15:10):
into like, or to hold it in a vacuum orin a bubble as a thing that we theorize
about or that we hold in abstraction.
And I think lately as I've beenlike, like kind of seeped in
this like academic environment.
I want everyone to bringit back to the ground.
Anti Blackness.
It's something that, that everyone holds.

(15:31):
And that everyone enacts.
And so, it's not an abstraction.
It is an intimate part of how blackpeople experience the world and how
the world experiences black people.
And it's within the fabric of allsocieties around, across the globe.
And so I think that, like, holdingthat intimacy with anti blackness
has been very important to me.

(15:53):
Especially as I and those who I loveexperience the, the violences of anti
blackness in real time, especially inthese academic environments which have
done all this intellectualizing around itand yet still perpetuate it and reify it.
But don't, but don't name that ordon't hold accountability for that.
And that's across different spacesthat we, we hold anti-blackness.

(16:16):
We, we know what it is.
We know how to define it.
We hold it in abstraction, butwe don't we aren't accountable
for the ways in which we.
reproduce it in our, in our daily lives.
And so that's, that's how I'm comingto this discussion of anti blackness.
But, me as a black woman, I waspredetermined by anti blackness.
The lens from which I come fromis from a black Native American

(16:38):
standpoint but also a mixed standpoint.
And I say that because my family ismixed with a lot of different races,
but we're mostly black and NativeAmerican specifically Muskogean.
And growing up, Black Native Americanwas very, very strange in the middle
of Alabama, being in the South,you know, I'm also coming from a
Southern standpoint as well butthere was no fitting in completely

(17:01):
it, it was, you were either Black orwhite and there was no in between.
I grew up in a space where we werenot allowed to be anything except for
Black on paper, which is the completeopposite of what we're supposed to be.
You know, what we're supposed toprove now we're supposed to have that
paperwork that says that we were blackand something else, you know, from
a Native American standpoint, you'resupposed to have that paperwork now.

(17:23):
And it just, it doesn'tmake any sense at all.
We were raised outside of areservation also from that standpoint,
I think we're still dealing with.
The results of the one drop rule.
We can see that on some of thosedocuments that I'm talking about.
I'm having to deal with it today,literally from a medical standpoint of
having to fight just to put just to putmy correct race on on medical records.

(17:50):
But all of this.
All of these experiences of beingdiscriminated against, it, it came
from honestly, and I know that thisis, this is probably going to be a
little bit controversial today, but Ireally wanted to include anti blackness
within the black community as well.
So I experienced a lot of that growing up.

(18:12):
What I'm talking about is antiblackness within the black community
is some, some of the experiencesthat I've had, that I had as a child.
Just for anyone who doesn't know on thiscall, it was not legal in the state of
Alabama for anyone to marry outside oftheir race until like the year 2000.
That's, that's withinall of our lifetimes.

(18:33):
So we were actively dealing with, with thelegality of that, like my family was, and
just some of the experiences that, thatwe had on the school bus and the school
bus especially I just remember being.
A small child and all I had to do wasstep on the bus and it was, we hate

(18:56):
you because, because you're mixed.
We hate you because, becauseyour grandma is, is fair skinned.
So just that that's kind of whatI'm talking about when I'm talking
about anti blackness within the blackcommunity, because that was from people
of color.
Thank you so much for to each of youfor being so vulnerable and courageous

(19:19):
and sharing these perspectives.
This is not easy.
This is so intrinsicallypersonal and lived experience.
And violent in all of its ways inwhich it has shown up and continues to.
Can we pull on a fewintersectional threads?
I think Tori alreadytaking us down this path.
Indy, you've spoken about ita little bit in terms of the

(19:40):
various identities you hold.
I'd love to hear your perspectiveon, um, the intersectional
nuances to anti blackness thatmake it specific in each arena.
There's many ways to come at this, right?
I think to go on what you weresaying earlier, Taylor, that anti

(20:00):
blackness is not a monolith, right?
That it's not just this abstraction.
It's inflected with race.
Right.
Of course, it's inflected with gender.
It's inflected with thesenotions of sexuality, right?
And it shows up very differently forblack queer folk, black trans folk, right?
So it, it, it lands onthe body differently.

(20:23):
And it's going to play outdifferently for, for folks.
I think for me, if, if there's onething that I think is important that I
would love for folks to take away is.
Blackness is not a descriptive term.
So what I mean by that is, I thinksometimes we use and we've increasingly
been using anti blackness as a as alanguage to describe racism more broadly.

(20:51):
I think we lose quitea bit when we do that.
So we use it or anti Blackness as thiskind of dominant framework for thinking
about a form or a sense of racism thatkind of permeates everyone experiences and
this kind of equitable What I want to kindof push us to think more broadly about,

(21:13):
and this is, this is coming from thework of quite a bit of folks, um, and I'm
happy to put the resources in the chat.
Thinking about folks like SaidiyaHartman, I'm thinking about folks
like Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton.
There's quite a bit of folks who havewritten about the specificity of anti
Blackness that, of course, maps onto thebodies of Black folks and Black lives.

(21:35):
But also encompasseseveryone in its wake, right?
Everyone's imbricated in anti Blackness,and so when we understand anti Blackness
as something that is foundational,foundational, foundational pillar to how
we understand what we now call the U.
S., and I say what we now call the U.

(21:57):
S.
because we can't understand antiBlackness without also talking about
Indigenous conquest, and we can't talkabout anti Blackness without talking
about Indigenous erasure, In real time.
And this is what allows for thingslike what Tori what you're referencing
of folks that kind of encounter theintersections of black and native lives

(22:18):
and histories and genealogies in waysthat is as if it's a shock or a surprise
that that is occurring or happening right.
But to think about anti blackness to getto what I was saying is something that
is a structural antagonism structuralfoundational to how we understand

(22:39):
this nation, and we can talk aboutit as a global formation but I want
to bring it back to the ground here.
In the US context to understand thatslavery wasn't something that was
just a historical period in time orhistorical stain that we have to redeem
ourselves for that we have to accountfor and then we can move forward.

(23:02):
If we accept that anti blacknessis something that's built into
the fabric of what we now knowas the US, and then structures.
all of our social relationshipsto each other, we then ask a
different set of questions.
So it then moves from how do weredress anti blackness through laws
and policies and inclusion and thekinds of, of discourses that we're

(23:28):
seeing now about being post racialand multicultural and about inclusion.
Those things can onlytake us so far, right.
And, you know, as of.
Just 2022, the statistics alone rightnow coming out of the ACLU about the
kind of censorship bills that arehappening, like all of the so called

(23:49):
progress that we saw in the wake of therebellions that happened in 2020 have
been rolled back and they're, they arebeing rolled back so, so, so quickly.
Just Florida, I want to say in Marchof 2024, the University of Florida did
away with all of its DEI initiatives.
Completely.

(24:10):
And so if we then accept thatanti blackness is something that's
foundational, we have to ask adifferent set of questions of what,
what is going to actually addressthis deep embedded inequity that
isn't just about reformist measures.

(24:31):
And, and we can open it up, and Iwould love to hear from other folks
as well, but I think that it, it, itmoves us to a different orientation
of the conversation and about whatis actually going to be required for
us to move, move beyond, if I want tosay that, move beyond anti blackness.
An aspect of anti blackness that Ikind of want to put forward during

(24:55):
this conversation is, Also, the thesystem of colorism and pigmentocracy.
And I think that as like a blackwoman who's light skinned, even more
important for me to put forward this.
Like this perspective, which is thatblack people who are fair skinned
or even multiracial do have a setof systemic privileges that are

(25:20):
privileged because of that proximity towhiteness or to ambiguity and therefore
experience life through a differentlens than darker skinned black people.
And especially dark skinnedblack women and queer people.
And so I think that that has alsobeen very central to the coloring of
my experience with anti blackness.
And also the way that I have witnessedanti blackness as it plays out in the

(25:43):
lives of my family who have dark skin,and also my friends who have darker skin.
when I came back to southern Virginiawhich is where I'm from, my parents put me
into an independent like private school.
Um, a conservative and independent privateschool which was predominantly white.
And I remember explicitly the ways inwhich I was treated as a light skinned

(26:05):
black girl and the ways in whichmy dark skinned peers were treated.
And so an example of that is, Iwould be called pretty for a black
girl, whereas my dark skinnedblack girlfriends would be called
unattractive or would be called ugly.
People would celebrate my hairstyles.
Or my hair texture, whereas mymy friends who had coily hair

(26:29):
texture were treated differently.
There was a situation where likeduring Halloween one year, one of
my closest friends who is dark skin,wore a a scarecrow costume and the
whole day got, got called a slave.
there are very real ways in which darkerskinned black people have to contend

(26:50):
with and experience anti blackness thatare different from the ways in which
I experience it being light skinned.
And those ways go beyond a couple ofmean things that kids do in school.
Although those things are also the productof of a system that is very structural.
And embedded in our day to dayactivities and experiences.
they are also explicitly structuralas in the jobs that you receive

(27:15):
the spaces that you can hold up.
The whether or not you can be shy andthat be considered being shy or whether
or not you can be shy and that that isconsidered being aggressive or angry.
And so, I just want tokind of put that forward.
I think that intra racially, like theseconversations have emerged like at
different points in my life, whetherthat be interpersonally between myself,

(27:38):
my dark skin front black friends, um, Orwhether or not, whether that be like in
the discourse of a classroom at Spelmanor in the discourses that we might have
had like during like in the lounge.
One, one final example while I wasat, while I was at Spelman, there was
a senior and whenever a senior doestheir thesis project usually they're
probably doing it like within the.

(27:59):
The context of Spelmanand Spelman students.
So there might be an email sentout that requests like interview
participants or volunteers.
And there is one thesis projectthat started circulating, which
was about a light skinned blackgirl's experience with colorism.
And the thing about this thing calledanti blackness and also this thing called
colorism in particular colorism is asystemic thing, which means that all

(28:24):
the things that I just described abouthow my dark skinned black girlfriends
were treated versus how I'm treatedthe way that they were treated was
structural, whereas the way that Iwas treated in the times that I was
being excluded, or maybe like one of myfriends who's called me Wonder Bread.
Me is like, I laughed at that all.
And that didn't have.
And although some people do havevery, like, deep seated pains with

(28:47):
isolation and feeling isolated fromcommunity, which is very valid and
I do want to remain sensitive to.
But those like picking on on meand those instances did not compare
to what I heard and I felt frommy dark skinned black girlfriends.
It was not structural.
It didn't mean that I couldn't get a job.
It didn't mean that that mylife choices were different.

(29:07):
And in this case, there was all thisdiscourse emerging out of this project
where a light skinned black womanwas saying that she faced colorism.
And we began having these discourses.
and I made the decision in that case.
To, to not speak being light skin, butto listen to what my dark skin peers were
saying to me the way and the way in whichthey articulated how their experience

(29:30):
with anti blackness was different thanmy experience with anti blackness.
And so I just wanted tokind of put that forward.
And being sensitive to the fact that.
There is a pigmentocracy, there is apigmentocracy to anti blackness and
it's the reason why and, and I'll getinto this later, but it's the reason
why communities, African countries,for example, with people that our dark

(29:54):
skin are treated a different type ofway are expected to be exploited, are
expected to suffer are expected to die.
It's the reason why why that isour expectation of black people.
It's the reason why we have animage in our minds when we think of
depraved communities, or poverty.

(30:14):
Um, or deviance.
It's a reason why there'san image that comes to mind.
And oftentimes that image isnot a light skinned one, or that
image does not look like me.
And so I think that it's important to kindof put that forward in this conversation.
I can completely see where you're comingfrom, and this is gonna sound crazy, but
I actually experienced it on both sides.
I was a majorette, and so for a long timein my life, practices were always outside.

(30:39):
I never viewed myself as, as, Lighterskin because I was always outside.
I did not know that my skin wasactually lighter than what it was
because I was just, I always, I prettymuch always had a tan for like years.
So when I finally got into college and Iwas like at the end of my rope with being

(31:02):
a majorette and I wasn't outside quite asmuch practicing we took a trip abroad to
Paris, and that was actually the first.
That was the first time that Iexperienced colorism on the other side.
Now on the way to Paris I wasdiscriminated against over and over
and over again in the airport becausethey continuously tested me for balms.

(31:24):
They thought, I'm pretty surethey thought I was Middle Eastern,
and so they just kept testingme for balms, which is stupid.
So awful and so racist, but there was noone else in my class that looked like me.
And so that's the only conclusionthat I could come to that made
sense that they kept testing mefor, for bombs in each airport.

(31:44):
Um, and when I finally got to Parisit was a wonderful experience for me.
Now I.
I did study French and I was like, well,maybe they're just, it's just this way
because, you know, I'm, I'm speaking thelanguage and I, I heard that people in
France or, you know, they like it whenyou can speak the language and blah, blah.
No, my, I had a couple of, a coupleof classmates that had more African

(32:10):
features and they were a bit darkerand their experience in Paris was
completely different from mine.
It was terrible for them.
They were discriminatedagainst everywhere we went.
There were, they were even refused food.
service in one of, one of therestaurants that we went into.
And I didn't know thatuntil we were done eating.
I, they just disappeared.

(32:30):
And I was like, where did they go?
And when we got out, they werelike, they wouldn't serve us.
I was like, but theyserved, they served me.
And that was the first timethat I had that experience.
And it was so reversed.
And I'm going to touch back ona little bit, what I said that
I experienced when I, I grew up,because some of that was colorism

(32:53):
then, but it was It was the opposite.
It was.
Your grandmother is lighterskinned, so we hate you for that.
Like, when I, when I say that theyhated me, I would step on the bus and
one of the things that this girl wasadamant about, Oh, so you're going to
your white grandmother's house today.
So you think you're better than us, right?

(33:13):
Cause you're, cause you're goingto your white grandmothers.
And I would correct her and I wouldsay, my grandmother's not white.
She's native American.
Oh, so now you're better than us.
Cause you're native American.
Oh, okay.
Your skin color is so ugly.
It's just so ugly.
Do you want me to buy yousome rags for Christmas?
And that was my experience everyday when we got on the bus.

(33:34):
So it's crazy that I kindof got to experience.
Like both sides of colorism.
Thank you all forsharing your experiences.
It is a very vulnerable thingto talk to strangers about
what's happened in your life.
So I appreciate it, the candor.
For me it's always a battle betweenis it my transness and my androgyny

(33:59):
or my visible queerness or is itmy blackness that's causing Me
to be treated in suspicious ways.
So I have, like, you know, a plethoraof examples of all the times that I felt
like I was either being discriminatedagainst or, you know, I was being,
told one thing and then talked aboutbehind my back or, you know, I was

(34:19):
being encouraged to participate in somethings because it was a form of tokenism
and people could say, Oh, we have one.
So that makes us okay.
Like, we did the job.
One thing I will say, and just becausewe brought up the topic of colorism
even when I think about the panelright now, like, we're all, in my
opinion, like, on the lighter side of.

(34:40):
Being black.
We don't have any very,like, dark skinned people.
My sister is a dark skinned woman.
Absolutely beautiful.
Her nickname was Beautiful Growing Up.
Cause she was just beautiful.
And, uh, I talked to her aboutcolorism one day and we had
like a real heart to heart.
Because I've always been consideredlike the lighter person in the family.

(35:01):
And her experience was, um, Way differentthan what I had perceived from the
outside looking in because to me, she'salways just been this beautiful woman.
That's it.
But she was treated by other peopleas if she wasn't beautiful, as if she
was some type of pariah sometimes,as if she, you know, didn't have the

(35:21):
same, you know, self worth of everyoneelse being on the planet, simply
because we are here and we exist.
And they were basing it on.
Skin color.
Which is absurd.
And so for my own I do my bestto like, listen more than I talk.
Even as a trans person, I know we'd belike, you know, come in and like, fill

(35:43):
up the space and all the things, but ifeverybody would listen more than we talk.
Then we would discover more.
I feel listen to the experiences ofpeople who are different than yours.
People who you actually thought werethe same as yours and listen to the
nuances of how those experienceshave in changed their life and
created, um, Their own stories.

(36:06):
So one of the things that I wrote down,which is similar to this colorism thing
the anti blackness, but also how it isa symptom of America, white supremacy
I put it in really lamest terms.
So I said, anti blackness isa symptom, a symptom of the
larger infection of America.
White people have, uh, convincingother demographics, uh, That they are

(36:28):
inherently better than everyone else,and then bullying those folk into
submission using religion, terror,and fear tactics, including violence,
sexual assault to assert that dominance.
Then realizing that they stillneed other people regardless,
but still want to feel superior.
So then they tell people thatthe closer they are to whiteness,

(36:49):
then they become better than Blackpeople, or people who are trans.
Darker, complected, or melanated,whatever you want to call it.
And for me, that's something that I'veexperienced regardless of the transness.
Right?
Regardless of my queer identity.
But the queer identity on topof that makes a weird kind

(37:12):
of amalgamation of stress.
Because I can only have sometimes itfeels like I have to compartmentalize
parts of myself like in this space.
You can only be black.
That looks like maybe dressinga little more masculine.
That looks like trying to fit intothe status quo a little bit better.
So you don't ruffle anybody's feathers.

(37:33):
That looks like trying to look the partwhen you go for a job interview, right?
And then on the flip end of that,when I find myself in spaces that are
supposed to be queer centered, butnot necessarily black centered, then
the transness or the queerness is thething that becomes super important.

(37:54):
Right?
So now that's where youget tokenism at, right?
I sort of started to feellike people are, making space.
But it's because they have like some weirdform of guilt around what they've been
told trans people are supposed to be.
And now we're trying to likeactively move in a different
direction, which is a good thing.

(38:15):
However, the, the applicationis oftentimes really shitty
and very inconsiderate.
And so I find myself having tocontend with, okay, can I be trans?
Can I be black?
Can I be black and trans and queer?
Can I be from the South?
Like how much of myself can Ibring into a room and it be okay?

(38:37):
what parts do I have to leave out tomake other people feel more comfortable?
I've gotten to a place in mylife now where I will be myself.
Period.
I am the person who sits at theintersection of all the things
that I like, and I am the personwho also sits at the intersection
of all the shit that I don't like.
So I know what I do fuckwith, and I know what I don't.
Excuse my language, but cursing isone of the things that I really like.

(38:58):
And so, I had to, like, realize for myselfthat these things are not and will never
be one more important than the other.
They are simpatico.
You know, all of my myidentities intersect to create
the me that is here now.
I am okay and worthy of beingalive simply because I am alive

(39:20):
and I exist and I am here.
That doesn't make me any better thanthe next person, but also doesn't make
me any worse than the next person.
You know, we all have choices.
At the end of the day choices are made,even the people who sit in the roundtables
and figure out ways to hurt other people.
Those are choices that are being made.

(39:42):
The systematized myths of, like, whitesupremacy and anti blackness, these are
literally moments where people will sitdown and have roundtable discussions
like this is happening now, and theydiscuss ways to fuck with other people.
They're making those choices.
It comes through in legislation.
It comes through in laws.
It comes through in, you know, gangaffiliation within the police departments.

(40:07):
But these are all choices thatindividuals, humans, are making on a daily
basis to either affect somebody's lifefor the positive, Or for the negative.
and so I always want to encourageeverybody to live in your intersections.
My problem is most of us do not fitinto any of the categories that exist.

(40:28):
We don't because we are a mixof all the things, but there
are certain groups of people, i.
e.
white supremacists, who are thentaking that information and Essentially
trying to convince people orindoctrinate us into believing that
we have to section off ourselves inorder to be treated fairly in society.

(40:51):
But this society was never createdfoundationally, like Shania said,
foundationally to treat everybodyequally, to treat everybody with equity.
That is not what America was for.
That is not why it was built.
That is not how it was built.
And so until we can, like,also get away from that idea.
That oh, it's a, you know, landof the free American dream.

(41:13):
That is what it is.
It is a dream.
It is something that they sell you.
It is a bill of goods.
But I will also say this.
Absolutely.
Everything on this planet that isconceptually created by humans.
is made up.
It is imaginary.
Somebody thought of it and thenconvinced enough people to get behind

(41:37):
the idea to bring it into fruition.
You can call it manifestation.
You can call it structural awareness.
You can call it whatever youwant, but it is all made up.
It came out of somebody's brain.
And then they either forced it onsomebody else or they indoctrinated
other people like children into thesystem to make it sustainable for it to
continue to like live a life of its own.

(41:59):
Therefore, since everything is madeup, we can make up something else.
We can choose something else,we can create something else,
we can make a different choice.
But it comes down to everybody, especiallyparents, and I'll talk about that a little
later on but it comes down to everybodyon an individual level to make a choice
for themselves, to use that autonomythat they do have because they are alive

(42:22):
and they do exist, to do different.
What is the unlearning we all needto do on an individual, collective,
systemic level to redress this?
insidious nature of anti blackness.
How do we center it in a waywhere, call it equity, call it

(42:46):
inclusion, call it whatever,
how do we center the black experience forwhat it is, not what one wants it to be,
or what one has prescribed it to be fora whole other community's set of comfort.
The biggest thing is redressing antiblackness requires That we contend with

(43:08):
losing something, there's no way toredress anti blackness and to keep the
very order of things that we currentlyhave and sustain it, prop it up patch
it, you know, like, there's no, wecan't do those things simultaneously.
So I think on an individuallevel, it requires folks to really

(43:29):
interrogate and think deeplyabout what are the unconscious.
and overt forms that theybenefit from anti blackness.
Because in some way, shape,or form, it is a currency.
It allows you something.
And because it allows you something,you're going to hold on to it.
You're going to make ityour sense of identity.

(43:51):
You're going to make it, this is who I am.
And so when we're talking about undoingthe thing that makes you who you think you
are, you're going to think you're dying.
You're going to think the world asyou know, it is imploding and in
a sense it is because what, whatis it, what is your world premised
on what is your world premised on.

(44:13):
So I think, you know, on an individuallevel, it's that type of interrogation
is that type of critical reflection.
It, it requires, youknow, doing deep work.
It requires reading.
It requires engaging black andindigenous thoughts without.
requiring Black and Indigenous folks toperform additional labor to teach you.

(44:37):
There's a whole archive ofknowledge production that folks
who have been on the receiving endof anti Blackness have produced.
And we are now in a world Where folksare actively trying to erase that
archive and I, and I can't reiteratethis enough, but they are actively

(44:58):
targeting spaces of education of, ofspaces where we, we hold up as this
kind of bastion of critical thought.
As the site in which we get to interrogatethings through a lens of curiosity and
innovation and all these things that we weproclaim that we want those spaces to be.
And yet they are the very site in whichall of those things are being undone, you

(45:22):
know, all those things are being censored.
Or erased in the classroom space.
And so for me, I, I always feel theclassroom space is a transformative space.
And so as an educator, as someone whohas taught at Spellman as an HBCU,
and someone who has taught at a PWIprimary white institution, I, there
is a, there is magic that can happen.

(45:44):
In a classroom space when you are cocreating and you are pushing yourself to
imagine something outside of the boundsof what you've been socialized to accept
as the norm, and it scares me and itshould scare everyone that this level of.
Yeah, this level of legislation that'scoming down our way and has been coming

(46:08):
down our way, I think, as of 2021,2022, there was 111 censorship bills
that were targeting K through 12.
Like, that should, thatshould terrify folks.
It means that the sites in which weproduce knowledge, the sites where
we interrogate so much, are thevery sites that folks are really
exerting power right now to makesure that we maintain a status quo.

(46:30):
And so.
Again, you know, at the level of theindividual, we have some, some deep work
to do, but also on a structural level, itmeans that we have to lose some things.
It means that some thingsare not worth holding onto.
What do you do with likethis kind of saver mentality?
Or, you know, what is something thatyou could do with taking action to
kind of dismantle it for yourself?

(46:51):
So this is what I came up with,and this is layman terms, right?
So I said, kill your saver.
Save your mentality.
Save yourself.
That's the thing.
So that means you gotta like,work on the bullshit, right, on
your, on the inside of yourself.
And then, with people whohave helped you identify that.
So, it's one thing to be aware of it.
It's another thing tobe able to act on it.

(47:12):
It's another thing toput it into application.
But you have to have people whoare going to hold you accountable.
And then you have to be comfortable,uncomfortable, but getting comfortable
with the fact that you're uncomfortablebeing held accountable for doing things,
or exhibiting behaviors, or sayingthings that are obviously Anti Black
or things that are kind of moving usin the opposite direction when we're

(47:34):
trying to get to a place of likeactual unity, actual solidarity but
not necessarily getting Black peopleto do the extra work for you, right?
So, because educational institutionsexist you don't need to have your
hand held by your Black friend.
That makes you like, okay, because youhave a black friend who some of them,

(47:55):
some of us are willing to teach, right?
Some of us are willing to have thoseconversations with people who are
not in the community in the sameway, or who have varying, varying
experiences to hold that work.
However, it is not the onus ofblack people to teach people
to not treat us so shitty.
because if you actually look at it, if welead by example, Black people have been

(48:18):
the most accepting group on the planet.
We have accepted everybody, right?
And often get, gotten a lot ofcriticism and erasure for it.
Because people take things, butthey rarely give things back.
Um, and so I also saystop lying to yourself.
And saying that you don't participate inthe anti blackness in the white supremacy,

(48:41):
in the racism, in the in the structuralsystems, watching is participation.
And to be a bystander when yousee injustice is to be complicit
in the bullshit, which is thewhite supremacy, which is why it
continues to be perpetuated, right?
I'd also say speak truth to power, right?
Kind of what we're doing right now,have the hard conversations that feel.

(49:04):
Icky sometimes.
We can't forever, and America's knownfor like, we'll just dust it under
the rug, you know, and then if weignore it long enough, it'll just
go away, but it doesn't go away.
It festers like a wound, like aninfection, things get worse, it becomes
more deep seated and it rots down to theroot, right, to the root of the thing.

(49:24):
America is comfortable for white people.
And for people who happen to be white.
Okay, so you have to considerbeing willing to be uncomfortable.
I, uh, Amanda Seals, inmy opinion, said it best.
There are white people, right?
So these are your alt right folk, yourleftist, um, your super right far your
KKK members, you know, into the policedepartment, all that kind of stuff.

(49:48):
And then you have people who happen to bewhite, who understand where they are in
the world, understand the privilege thatthey have, understand white fragility,
understand white tears, understandthe idea that America was actually
built on the backs of a whole notherdemographic of people that they now profit
from, generations and generations andgenerations later, and then have decided

(50:08):
that, Oh, that really was messed up.
We should do something else.
But if you are white, ifyou happen to be white.
It is of benefit to you.
That is what we have to admit.
It is a benefit to you.
And then it starts to trickle overinto the colorism conversation.
Because the closer you are to whiteness,the more privileges you seem to have,

(50:29):
the better you seem to be treated,the more people respect you seemingly.
Consideration goes a long way.
At least it does for me.
And what I've noticed is Black peopleare taught, especially Black women, to
consider everybody else before themselves.
And it would be very nice to beconsidered, period, by other people.

(50:52):
An example, and thenI'll like, stop talking.
I have a really close friend who I love.
She's amazing.
But we did have a little tiff in ourfriendship towards the beginning because
we went all to a burlesque show, you know,when you're going to see a good time.
And, um, they were with their nonblack friends and some more like
white friends who had come to join.

(51:13):
And then myself and like my black friends.
We were also there, right?
So we kind of bought our tickets separate.
And somehow they got a table andit was like reserved for them.
And there was only enough space for allthe light skinned people and all the
non Black people to sit at the table.
So me and my Black friend wentand sat in the back and we watched

(51:37):
the show as best as we could.
and then in the moments where the, theother People who joined decided that
they didn't want to see the show anymore.
They were leaving and theseats became available.
Then my friend was like, Hey,you know, the seats are free now.
Like come, come on over andsit and watch the show now.

(51:57):
And my exact reaction waslike, no, forget that.
We're going to sit here, we're going towatch the rest of the show, and then once
the show ends, me and my Black friendare going to go mind our own business.
But then later, I had to sit down andhave a conversation with that friend to be
like, this is why it felt inconsiderate.
Because any time that we have gone outspecifically, if, even if you brought

(52:17):
people that I wasn't even aware werecoming to the to the function, I made
sure I could do whatever was in mypower, that we could all sit together.
It was that simple.
We could all sit together.
We can all enjoy the show together.
We can all be in space together.
But, when it came to, or what it lookedlike, was having these other fair skinned

(52:40):
folk around, all of a sudden, your blackfriends kind of get cast to the wayside.
And then, only when they decide to leave,or they have something else better to
do, that you decide, oh, okay, well,let me, like, bring over the other
people who were supposed to be here inthis thing from the beginning as well.
And it's just simply inconsiderate.
they weren't raised the same way though,and I had to understand that too.

(53:02):
You know, I was raised verymuch, you leave with the same
people that you came with.
You check on all of your friendsto make sure that they are good.
You know, there's a, there's acertain level that I've seen Black
mothers give to their children whenit comes to looking out for their own.
I was also raised in a very patchworkedfamily, we, I call this like the X

(53:24):
family because everybody kind of gotlast names, but that is because my mother
has two sisters who are not of blood,but blood couldn't make them any closer.
Right?
So they end up raising allof their children together.
So now I have cousins who we don'tshare a blood relation, but those are
my cousins and they will go to batfor me and I will go to bat for them.

(53:44):
You know what I'm saying?
One phone call, everybodyshowing up at the door.
That is important, right?
And not a lot of, not a lot of people,and I had to come to realize, have
experienced something like that,to the extent of you look out for
those who look out for you, right?
And in the Black community, we do havethis very very heavy, heavy, heavy,

(54:07):
like, you know, Division of like,who is supposed to be important and
who is not supposed to be important.
Who are you supposed to giveyour time and attention to?
As opposed to being in these blendedsituations, which you find in a lot
of queer communities, you find in alot of like, adoptive families and
such, where you're looking out forthe people because they are humans.

(54:30):
They are other human beings and theyneed other people to be in their corner.
If that makes sense.
I guess I'll kind of answer in a similarway that Tony Morrison did when asked
this question, which is that whenit comes to anti blackness, racism,
specifically in the American context.
That's an issue for whitepeople to figure out.

(54:51):
It's an issue that was anti blacknessis a construction of the white imaginary
white supremacy, another constructionof the white imaginary, which is enacted
through systems and institutions thatare extremely violent to black people.
And I think that oftentimes inlike diversity and inclusion
settings and academic settingsand professional settings.

(55:12):
The question is posed.
Okay, well, Black people, what arewe going to do about anti Blackness?
And for me, of course, there are, thereare moves and strides and movement
work that Black people have, do andhave done and continue to do in the
interest of our survival and enduranceagainst anti Blackness, of course.
And that will remain untilwe, until we, see liberation.

(55:36):
But in terms of like, The spaceswhere white people are asking us
or non black people are asking us,well, what can we do to fix this?
I think that that is something thatyou should figure out how to do.
And I think that you should do soconsulting the resources at your
disposal, the the articles and thebooks and the publications that black

(55:58):
people work so hard to put forward.
The other like source material thatblack people spend time and energy
and creating and putting forwardinto the world about anti blackness.
To, to use those resources inorder to figure out how to solve
this issue that that you created.
And I think that yeah, I think thatI think that more people need to take

(56:19):
up that, that, that goal, specificallyin the academic space, which is
the space that I'm coming from.
And.
Like an anthropology, which has,like, a hugely colonial history.
A lot of white people are interestedin studying black and indigenous
cultures are very invested inunderstanding black people and black
life indigenous people, indigenous life.

(56:39):
And yeah, and I'm like whereis the white studies at?
That's the question I ask.
Like, who is trying to figure outthe complexities of whiteness, how
it exists and how it purports itself.
I think over, like, a couple days ago,I watched I went to one of one of the
professors that TA for consulted onthis play that just came out in New York

(57:02):
at the public theater called the ally.
And just hear it like hearing the name.
I was already like, super skeptical.
It's also discussing thegenocide against Palestinians.
And it's written, I don't knowthe identity location of the, of
the author, but it also considersJewish identity and the politics of,
of Jewishness and whiteness whitesupremacy, anti blackness, and then

(57:25):
also Palestinian liberation movements.
And so going into it,I was very skeptical.
I'm like, what is this?
What is what is thisgoing to going to give?
But it was actually like, like athrough the genre in the medium of
play of a play, which also I wasconcerned about because how sensitive
going to play be to this moment.

(57:46):
But through the medium of a play.
Like I would I would posit thatthis play was a study on whiteness.
And it was very interestingto watch because I don't think
people do it often enough.
We don't know the like, I really don't.
I'm not very I'm not very up on, like,the thought processes of white people and

(58:07):
white people also are very seldom honest.
About their anti blackness andabout their and about the ways
in which they've been socialized.
And the, I like the ideology of whitesupremacy that they part to actively
participate in and ignite and enact.
Even if there are peoplewho happen to be white.
I think that I think that There is stilla active way in which white liberals and

(58:31):
progressives engage in anti blackness.
And I'm reminded of like a white friendthat I had like years back who like,
like, I mentioned before that was likevery rebellious and even in middle
school, and I was like going, I waslike, I was, I was like, Like going
at it all like constantly very much.
People used to call meAngela, Angela Davis.

(58:51):
And this white friend was kind oflike going along the journey with me.
And so, I was like like, I don't knowif we could describe ourselves as
intellectual, like friends of the mind,because I don't know how reciprocal
it was, but I was rubbing off on her.
And one day she said now that Ithink about it, I really think like
that black people are inferior.

(59:13):
Like when people, when people mentionblack people or, or when I think
about it, like I actually, like,I don't think that black people
are smarter than white people.
I don't think that white people, uh, Imean that black people are, are the norm.
Like I think whiteness isthe norm and, and, and, and
that nor like that normative.

(59:34):
Idea in my mind is in directopposition or in contrast to
blackness as a state of being.
And of course, those are in my words, butbut that moment just kind of illuminate
like she just told me this and it kindof illuminated for me, like white people
know and non people black people knowthat if they were to wake up tomorrow.

(59:54):
Black that they wouldn't that theywouldn't be jumping for that opportunity.
I mean, do they want toparticipate in black culture
and black expressions and a V.
Sure, but to hold the conditionin the state of being black.
I don't think anybody wantsthat or wants to deal with the
social repercussions of that.

(01:00:15):
And so I think that I think that whitepeople and non black people are aware to a
degree of their intuitive anti blackness.
And yet, because of the stigmas aroundbeing called anti black or being called
racist, or perhaps like the the moral.
The morality of being otherwisedoesn't allow for people to admit,

(01:00:40):
like, I'm, like, I'm anti black.
So going off of what Indy was sayingbefore, like admitting, like, I'm, hi, my
name is such and such and I am anti black.
And I think that if we got there,we could, we could move forward.
Because like, it's also Strenuousfor black people to have to
consistently remind people.
This is anti black.

(01:01:00):
This is anti black and for toconstantly get that pushback of
like everything's not about race.
Everything's not anti black.
Everything's not racist oreverything's not about black people.
I think that if we if we wereto accept the fact that are the
fabric of our society globally.
Is is structured and defined byanti blackness and pigmentography.

(01:01:25):
And I think that if we get there,we could get, we could get further.
but yeah, I think that white peopleneed to figure out the solution.
Using the many resources at their disposalthat black people have put forward.
I think a lot of it wouldjust come from listening.
Like, I've been in a lot of conversationswith people where we're literally just in
casual conversation and I'll say somethingand there's, you know, a rebuttal from

(01:01:50):
white people that's like, well, well,it's not like that because da da da.
So I think a part of it comes fromlistening and I also think that a part
of it comes from the Education systemas far as, you know, dismantling just
dismantling some of the miss education.
But how do we, how do we do that?
Like, that's, that's 1 of the things thatwe're trying to figure out within my, my

(01:02:13):
own organization is how do we do that?
How do we solve that?
How do we attack the education system towhere we can fix some of these things that
are, that are in the school books, butit comes from a state level and the state
level gets it from the federal level.
That's kind of the approachthat, that I have on it.
I would be
remiss if I didn't ask a questionthat came from one of our registrants,

(01:02:35):
especially because we have you know,between all four of you, there is a
big artist perspective and experience.
In terms of disrupting and or dismantlinganti Blackness, what do you feel is
required or necessary of artistic spacesand folks that lead the space often?
I think that there needsto be more of a freedom.

(01:02:57):
I hate going into spaceswhere there are guidelines.
I can't stand that.
Like I'm literally in themiddle of Alabama and so it's
always about civil rights.
But I feel like there are so manydifferent avenues where we could,
we could do some dismantling,we could teach people things.
We don't always have to go from one pointof view in order to get a point across.

(01:03:19):
I think just giving artiststhe space to be an artist.
is a huge part of it.
More variety of storytelling.
So I want the good, the bad, theugly, the disturbing, and the joyful.
I think if we have more variety,because I honestly also believe that
there will never be a time wherewhite people A white supremacist,

(01:03:43):
whatever, in this country will let upthat they built it for a certain way.
They want that and money is used asthis gateway to keep certain folk
out of certain spaces or make surecertain stories don't get told.
So if we just had a larger varietyfrom black creators, from people
of color who are just creatingtheir things, then there would be.

(01:04:03):
Just more representation as awhole from trans people from,
you know, I just need more of it.
The white centric storiesare not going to stop.
I'm also not asking for them to stop.
You know what I'm saying?
I just want more of something else, youknow, more options to learn from, think
about, get into, find a new perspective.
And the last thing I would say is, Peopleof color, both in front of the camera,

(01:04:27):
in front of the stage, whatever you wantto call it, behind the camera, funding
the project also, because it allows usto hold on to our creative power, right?
And anytime there, Black people havecreated something that was worth keeping,
there have been folk who come andtry to step on our sandcastles, okay?
So I really would like to hold, hold on tothe creative power that we have, because

(01:04:51):
then you option these scripts, right?
These stories, these books and thenit gets revised, it gets edited, it
gets put through a white lens, it getsfiltered, it gets whitewashed sometimes,
including in the educational system.
As in, like, there were moments wherethere were schools only that had Black
teachers teaching Black students about,you History, you know what I'm saying?

(01:05:14):
So when those things got defunded, we gotintegrated and all those kinds of things.
Now we're learning white history,whitewashed history specifically,
you know what I'm saying?
So we need to hold on tothe power that we have.
And unfortunately, moneyis a tool to do that.
I do think that there is certain artthat's just like, I kind of just want

(01:05:35):
to watch such and such because I justwant to chill today, or like I need
a moment of reprieve and escapismand so I'm watching this not to make
a political statement but to rest.
So I do, I do think that and engage inthat active, I mean actively participate
in that, but I think that there'salso a level of rigor that I need from
artists and from consumers, when itcomes to the politics of anti blackness.

(01:06:00):
Or or when it comes to using art andmovement work towards a liberatory future.
And so by that, I mean, the artthat we produce and put out into
the world should be handled witha, um, handled with meticulousness.
Handle with care.
It shouldn't be a first draft, like TylerPerry's, uh, Tyler Perry's new movie.

(01:06:21):
What's it called?
Mia's Copa or something like, like,like that didn't even go through
the writer's room, like three times.
Like it didn't even gothrough writer's room twice.
But so, so, so there I use that exampleto say, like, I need a level of rigor
and meticulousness and study andresearch when it comes to producing
and putting forward a piece of art.
So I think that that art should.

(01:06:44):
That art should be the product of deepconsideration of, spiritual practices,
intellectual practices, um, love work,like intersecting and creating creating
art to put forward art that is radicalor that art is that, that is a part
of a radical tradition and lineage.
So, so that studying like, like the musicthat we put forward, if we're saying

(01:07:07):
that we're an R& B artist, like youshould have studied many genres, many,
many artists, many musicians to get tothe product that you're putting forward.
so that's what I mean by level of rigor.
Then I think there should be also a levelof rigor on the part of the consumer.
So us as consumers of art.
And consumers of of media, whether thatbe music, film, television contemporary

(01:07:31):
art visual art, whatever the casemay be, I think that there should
also be a level of rigor on our part.
What kind of media arewe giving our attention?
What are we, what are we looking, like,are we looking at the, the art that
we're viewing with a critical eye?
Are we coming to the art with aknowledge of its lineages with a
knowledge of the artists like identityposition or a knowledge of what the

(01:07:53):
artist is trying to put forward.
And I think that if the, if we havethese two levers levels of rigor.
And also a communication and acollaboration between artists and part
and the people in the audience to thatart, because when we think about like.
Are intersecting with radical movements.
I mean, the black musical tradition alonehas been deeply intertwined with radical

(01:08:15):
movements with the civil rights movementwith, the black Panther Party movement or,
um, the black power movement of the 80s.
Whether that be the Harlem Renaissance,and it's also always been in conversation
with academic spaces like with otherlike mediums and spaces within like.
Black thought production andBlack cultural production.
So I think that there needs to be also acommunication and a collaboration across.

(01:08:39):
Across like these areas and like theselocations because like I'm saying, like
I was saying before, artistic movementhas always coincided with the movements
that are happening on the ground.
And I think that in our contemporaryworld, we kind of get away from that
at times to where I think like the mostlike, the example that's to the front
of my mind is during the movement workduring 2020 that was incited by the the

(01:09:04):
The many police killings, including GeorgeFloyd and Breonna Taylor and Beyonce
releases Black Parade and I just remembermovement leaders on the ground commenting,
like, This didn't hit like, Nina Simone.
This didn't hit like, like the Coltrane's,it didn't hit like the artists that
were producing work during, like radicalmovements, that were happening on the

(01:09:26):
ground and you could see that there wasa clear, like, relationship between the
art and the movements because the artistswere also participating in the movement.
And there was like that, thatrelationship and that collaboration
in that community there.
And so I would say that that I do and havelike required and increasingly require

(01:09:47):
that level of rigor when it comes to art.
And when it comes to activism but Ido want to like end on the note that
like, sometimes I come home and I'm nottrying to watch, like, I'm not trying
to watch like, uh, pondering on raceand gender and, in class and empiricism.
And sometimes I want to put onlove is blind and that's real too.
And there are many things to observeabout, um, all the, the structures that

(01:10:08):
we've mentioned in those things too,but sometimes I do want to click it off
and black people deserve that as well.
I wanted to end on that note.
And I hope that no one takes thisthe wrong way when I say it, but
I think a huge part of it also isto, from an artist standpoint, give
the Black agenda like a wrist, asin like forcing us to do something.

(01:10:30):
To forcing us to do acertain thing in native art.
We don't just paint the trail oftears over and over and over again.
You know what I mean?
When you go to a therapy session, you'renot going to focus on one part over and
over and over and over again, you'regoing to talk about different things.
So I think as a black person in theblack community, if you give us the

(01:10:53):
space to just create more of ourstories are going to come out of that.
If we just kind of walk away with thisnotion that what we have been doing,
which is representation matters, right,which is falls flat every time because
there's particular forms of tropes andnarratives, as you're saying, Tori, as

(01:11:17):
well, that kind of get reiterated againand again and again, then constrain
and confine what blackness can be.
And so I think moving beyondthat, allowing folks the.
the imagination, the full scope ofimagination to think about, write about,
dream about our stories that cannotjust be reduced to anti blackness.

(01:11:41):
And so, That's one thing that I think thatI really want to reiterate is that while
I think that it's important to centeranti blackness, the violences, the way
that it happens in overt and explicitimplicit ways, mundane ways, right?
Black life is not reducible toanti black violence and it's not

(01:12:02):
reducible to the kind of distortedfantasies that are projected onto us.
And so I think if we move fromthat space, we can, we can.
Really imagine the full capaciousness, thefull expansiveness of blackness to emerge.
But as it stands right now, becauseof the kinds of structures and stories

(01:12:26):
that folks want to consume, it staysat the level of representation matters.
Thank you for naming that, Shania.
The other point there is,who is producing the work?
Where is the money coming from?
And what is their lens to Black life?
The theater industry right nowis literally being toppled over
with all of these questions goingdeeper in various, various ways.

(01:12:50):
And one of the, one of the biggestchallenges for theaters across
the country is how do we getback our audiences in the seats?
And that directly goes to what arethe stories that we are telling,
have been telling, what are thedemographics of these audiences
who are paying for these tickets.
So it's very interwoven in order togive this freedom, this radical rigor

(01:13:16):
to artists to express themselves.
To black artists to express themselves.
The other side of interrogation must bedrawn to where is the funding coming from?
who is sitting in those seats?
What are they being asked of?
What are they asking for?
And what is the unlearningthat needs to happen there?

(01:13:37):
I want to end with this foranyone listening who identifies
as non black and non white.
This is as much unlearning for us.
As it is for the communities named onthis, uh, in this conversation as someone
who grew up in India and has seen theinsidious nature of anti Blackness

(01:13:58):
in how I was raised the perceptionof a darker skin color, the reduction
of one's existence, there is a lotfor each of us to do as a humanity.
In this work.
So I just want to liftup that responsibility.
My goodness, Indy, Taylor,Tori, Shania, thank you.
Just deep, deep gratitude for, forsharing of yourselves in, in the most

(01:14:23):
complex, nuanced, vulnerable ways.
I, this was not easy.
I cannot imagine that this waseasy to show up in this way.
Deeply honored that you choseto do so here and, and gave us
the gift of this conversation.
I think it's important to say, pleasedo something nourishing for yourselves.
this was big work that was done here.
So thank you all.

(01:14:44):
Thank you for listening to Farsight Chats.
I really hope that these episodesthat we have explored together have
helped to grow not only our collectiveunderstanding, but have really empowered
us with tools to show up more inclusivelywithin our organizations and communities.
Stay tuned and subscribe now to FarsightChats, wherever you get your podcasts.

(01:15:07):
We will be back with more episodes laterthis year that will focus specifically
on the workplace and how we can createhealthier, inclusive cultures within it.
Don't forget to follow us onInstagram and Facebook at GoFarsight,
LinkedIn at the Farsight Agency, andcheck out our website goFarsight.
com to know more aboutwho we are and what we do.

(01:15:29):
Thank you for answering the call todo more, do better, and do different.