Speaker 1: Cold Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Say it you mail.
Speaker 3: Six sixteen.
Speaker 4: Character.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
Speaker 3: to the main characters of the Internet see how their
Speaker 3: moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says
Speaker 3: about us and the Internet. And today we're continuing our
Speaker 3: series with the one and only Tayzon Day of Chocolate
Speaker 3: Rain fame. And if you've been living happily in the
Speaker 3: Wi Fi signal as woods up until yesterday, maybe you're
Speaker 3: unfamiliar with Tay and his most famous work, which has
Speaker 3: been going viral every year or so since two thousand
Speaker 3: goddamn seven, But you might not know the deep anti
Speaker 3: racist roots of that same song, something that was pretty
Speaker 3: obscured for the first decade or so of Chocolate Rain's history.
Speaker 3: And for all that, and for Tazon Day aka Adam
Speaker 3: Bonner's origin story as a young autistic, mixed race guy
Speaker 3: who started posting on YouTube and unwittingly became an online
Speaker 3: superstar just shy of the US recession and in conjunction
Speaker 3: of vin Senator Barack Obama, becoming a national star. For
Speaker 3: a full look at what Tay's rise to fame looked
Speaker 3: like in the moment, head back to the first episode
Speaker 3: of this series, where we cover it in detail and
Speaker 3: Tay himself gives us some insight into his early life.
Speaker 3: But today, for this minisode, I'm going to hand the
Speaker 3: mic off to the incomparable Tayson Day to tell you
Speaker 3: about his political education specifically. Maybe this sounds a little weird,
Speaker 3: but go with me here. When we left off in
Speaker 3: our first episode, Tay had just begun to be educated
Speaker 3: on the consequences American systemic racism had well into the present,
Speaker 3: something his mixed race family hadn't talked to him about
Speaker 3: as a kid as he grew up in the eighties
Speaker 3: and nineties. And when he told his white dad about
Speaker 3: beginning to learn this with some excitement and enthusiasm, his
Speaker 3: dad began to cry. I guess I'll just add here
Speaker 3: that this material, while the kind of conversations that I'm
Speaker 3: really into, are not necessarily canon to the Tazon Day's story,
Speaker 3: and it might not be for everybody. However, I was
Speaker 3: really touched at how open Day was with sharing how
Speaker 3: he reached both the place he was in his political
Speaker 3: consciousness and how that formed Chocolate Rain, and how he's
Speaker 3: grown since. So if you're into that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: I think you'll really like this episode.
Speaker 3: If you just want to hear the rest of his
Speaker 3: story in terms of his linear viral experience, definitely tune
Speaker 3: in to our concluding part on Tuesday. The following episode
Speaker 3: is the process that Tay went through to try to
Speaker 3: get to the root of his father's behavior, and they're
Speaker 3: still close to this day, but getting to a satisfying
Speaker 3: conclusion required that Tay go through a thorough history of
Speaker 3: activism and academia that he was largely unfamiliar with. And
Speaker 3: that's where we're picking up today. So if you're in
Speaker 3: the mood to be radicalized or re radicalized, gather round.
Speaker 3: Here's tay'son day.
Speaker 2: I'm going to unpack this for almost thirty minutes, but
Speaker 2: it is a journey that should have familiar scenery for
Speaker 2: a lot of people. I'll crudely defined critical race theory
Speaker 2: is the idea that historical racial injustice manifests as present
Speaker 2: day racial oppression, even if people in the present day
Speaker 2: are not deliberately or consciously being racist. I'll crudely define
Speaker 2: sociological marginalization theory as the idea that race, class, gender,
Speaker 2: physical ability, religion. All of these are axes of oppression
Speaker 2: that have favored and less favored groups. So critical race
Speaker 2: theory would argue that white supremacy creates unacceptable injustice in
Speaker 2: a person's life the moment they are conceived, so it
Speaker 2: says a baby born will die before the sin. Sorry,
Speaker 2: that was low hanging fruit. Sociological marginalization theory would argue
Speaker 2: that if your white, male, Christian, able bodied, heterosexual property class,
Speaker 2: you are conferred advantages in society that you would not
Speaker 2: be conferred if the playing field was level. Critical race
Speaker 2: theory and sociological marginalization theory are both what would be
Speaker 2: called structuralist theories. So what does structuralism mean, of which
Speaker 2: these structuralist theories are apart. I'll crudely define structuralism as
Speaker 2: the idea that your theory of how the world operates
Speaker 2: in terms of power or knowledge also determines the motivations, morals,
Speaker 2: and identities of groups of human beings. Famous structuralists include
Speaker 2: Charles Darwin, the evolution Guy, Karl Marx, the communism Guy,
Speaker 2: Milton Friedman, and other economists, Betty free Dan, and a
Speaker 2: lot of second wave feminist epistemology. There are many critiques
Speaker 2: in schools of thought that point out the shortcomings of structuralism,
Speaker 2: and we call those post structuralists. We're not done with theory,
Speaker 2: but real quickly, let's check back on this moment with
Speaker 2: my father where twenty one year old me just excitedly
Speaker 2: repeated structuralist terminology that Bell Hooks uses white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,
Speaker 2: and my father started to cry. A post structuralist like
Speaker 2: Dereda might say that my father was crying and thinking
Speaker 2: nah to me and receiving my structural observation as a
Speaker 2: very personal accusation, because my father believed, in the goodness
Speaker 2: of his heart and the sacredness with which he had
Speaker 2: lived his life, that the structuralist term white supremacist capitalist
Speaker 2: patriarchy did not apply to him, and that he had
Speaker 2: lived his life differently, or in the post structuralist critique
Speaker 2: of Dereta, my father believed that he had repeated the
Speaker 2: structure differently. A common criticism that post structuralism has of
Speaker 2: structuralism is that structuralism confiscates choice from individuals in order
Speaker 2: to render people as dominoes. And it's almost like just
Speaker 2: the words of Belle Hooks without any other context, white
Speaker 2: supremacist capitalist patriarchy made my father feel like a domino
Speaker 2: that I had suddenly started to render in a certain way.
Speaker 2: And some people are listening to this and thinking, yeah,
Speaker 2: but Bell Hooks was not making a personal accusation against
Speaker 2: your father in using structuralist terminologies, and many of you
Speaker 2: thinking that way. We'll also say, well, the truth is
Speaker 2: just the truth, and we've got to be able to
Speaker 2: speak about the truth. And if that's traumatic for some people,
Speaker 2: then that's work they have to do. That's not on
Speaker 2: the person speaking the truth. What's interesting is that almost
Speaker 2: every person I encounter who advances that perspective and I
Speaker 2: point four fingers back at me because it's a perspective
Speaker 2: I have held many waking days of my own life.
Speaker 2: As soon as I turn the tables and start listing
Speaker 2: the myriad ways their life has been enabled by plunder, genocide, oligarchy,
Speaker 2: et cetera, they react much as my father did. It's
Speaker 2: hurtful and makes them defensive if I point out, hey, yeah,
Speaker 2: that iPhone that you posted all that fire and brimstone
Speaker 2: ad hominem humanist outrage with online probably contains Mineral's mind
Speaker 2: by child slaves and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
Speaker 2: was probably manufactured under very questionable human rights conditions in Asia,
Speaker 2: and those things were both partly enabled by technocratic currency
Speaker 2: manipulation that eugenically devalues African born in Asian bodies relative
Speaker 2: to your body using the exact currency that you pay
Speaker 2: your car note with and bought your lunch with. Nobody
Speaker 2: likes to be called up like that, even if the
Speaker 2: accusations are true. They like to think of themselves as
Speaker 2: Derridah thinks of the individual. They like to believe they
Speaker 2: are the exception to the rule. They are repeating the
Speaker 2: structure differently and it does not apply to them. So
Speaker 2: before anybody is too hard on my father, really think
Speaker 2: about yourself, because, especially if your life is derived from
Speaker 2: Western civilization, you have never experienced nor acted upon anything
Speaker 2: from your cradle to your grave that is morally sacrosanct.
Speaker 2: In a structuralist interrogation of power and plunder, and in
Speaker 2: my experience, when policy discussion gets reduced to personal absolution olympics,
Speaker 2: that's almost always mutual assured destruction, which, as a I'll
Speaker 2: get into it a little bit, is kind of the
Speaker 2: point of today's social media. By the way, I love
Speaker 2: bell Hooks and I love my iPhone. But I can
Speaker 2: love them and still acknowledge reality. I can love them
Speaker 2: and still powerfully win policy arguments and powerfully lead a
Speaker 2: revolution with no invocation of my personal moral absolution. We're
Speaker 2: still unpacking this moment with my father. I told you
Speaker 2: would be here a while. Put another marshmallow on the fire.
Speaker 2: I don't think my father's sadness and hurt in this
Speaker 2: moment was simply him believing Belle Hooks had taught me
Speaker 2: to accuse him of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. But also
Speaker 2: he desired for me to feel as though I lived
Speaker 2: freely in a world where I did not have to
Speaker 2: be constrained by racial identity. I think another part of
Speaker 2: that tearful reaction was part of his realization that I'm
Speaker 2: not living in that world, that these things are very,
Speaker 2: very salient concerns for me, and that the post racial
Speaker 2: utopia family life that emerged from his and my mother's
Speaker 2: dreams did not extend beyond our household, and that I
Speaker 2: had somehow, almost like eve bit the Apple, I had
Speaker 2: become corrupted by Oh wait, there's this whole other world
Speaker 2: out here, and is this is now adult son? And
Speaker 2: just like I'm exiting the matrix and realizing, wait, I
Speaker 2: feel wet, I feel cold. Nobody told me about these things.
Speaker 2: I don't feel placated anymore. And so that's how I
Speaker 2: wrote Chocolate Rain to find a way to talk about
Speaker 2: race that didn't make my father cry. No, we're getting
Speaker 2: way ahead in the story, but recording this is the
Speaker 2: first time I ever made that connection, I will say,
Speaker 2: and this is the meat of why I did that.
Speaker 2: Theoretical breakdown that we'll get back to revolutionary and resistance
Speaker 2: dialogue has become a little bit too enamorous with structuralist
Speaker 2: language in twenty twenty five. We're kind of in love
Speaker 2: with structuralism being the path to revolution. I have at
Speaker 2: times been guilty of that, and part of the reason
Speaker 2: for that is just social media is very very structuralist
Speaker 2: in how it organizes our public discourse. You could even
Speaker 2: go so far as to say that Chocolate Rain was
Speaker 2: a post structuralist piece of content on a post structuralist
Speaker 2: wild wild West Internet. So you had this perfect alignment
Speaker 2: of stars. Today, the Internet is much more regimented. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, you did not have algorithmic feeds monitoring,
Speaker 2: spying on thousands of pieces of user telemetry to try
Speaker 2: to predict what would keep the user on the platform
Speaker 2: as long as possible. YouTube was actually curated by human
Speaker 2: editors at that time. So yeah, there's this whole viral
Speaker 2: video era from around what i'd say, die Coca and
Speaker 2: mentos in two thousand and six, all the way through
Speaker 2: maybe Gonggam style in twenty eleven, where these massively our
Speaker 2: videos were possible on a post structuralist Internet, where eventually
Speaker 2: companies like Google and Facebook learned they would make more
Speaker 2: money by imposing more structure. And that's where we get
Speaker 2: recommendation engines and feeds and these ads and platforms that
Speaker 2: spy on all of our behavior to try to predict
Speaker 2: what will addict us. And so a phenomenon like chocolate
Speaker 2: Rain that had vague and flexible meaning that could be
Speaker 2: widely appropriated that's not allowed on today's Internet. That's profane.
Speaker 2: Ads can't predict human behavior in that type of ecosystem.
Speaker 2: Today's Internet needs content to be what capitalists would call
Speaker 2: a fixed asset. That also means it must have a
Speaker 2: fixed meaning and a fixed audience response. The viral video
Speaker 2: era in which chocolate Rain went viral was completely different.
Speaker 2: It was all about reframing, reappropriating, lampooning meaning the top
Speaker 2: content creators like Venetian Princess or barely pull it out
Speaker 2: on YouTube, they would parody the music videos of gigantic
Speaker 2: artists like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, and their parodies
Speaker 2: would get tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of
Speaker 2: millions of views. And if young people today take away
Speaker 2: one thing about how the Internet used to be and
Speaker 2: how it is different than what we have today, it's
Speaker 2: that it used to be possible to completely reframe the
Speaker 2: meaning of a mainstream content asset and have your reframe
Speaker 2: reach a gigantic audience, not a pre vetted and partisan
Speaker 2: audience whose confirmation biases are just validated by the way
Speaker 2: that you reframe a piece of content. No, you could
Speaker 2: reach an undecided, undifferentiated majority, completely outside of your thought
Speaker 2: bubble or thought ecosystem, with the content you uploaded in
Speaker 2: the past organically. And this all circles back to my
Speaker 2: earlier statement that revolutionary Discourson you could maybe sometimes call
Speaker 2: it leftism, bread tube, you could go by many names,
Speaker 2: has fallen a bit too much in love with structuralism
Speaker 2: because passionate young activists have grown up in this fake
Speaker 2: oligarchic information regime, where it is impossible for layered meaning,
Speaker 2: symbolic meaning, metaphorical meaning, liminal meaning to access undecided eyeballs
Speaker 2: and grow an audience. They'll sometimes attack positions that introduce
Speaker 2: complexity as though that complexity is motivated by malice and
Speaker 2: a rejection of their through line narrative that they want
Speaker 2: to reach an audience with the problem when a passionate
Speaker 2: revolutionary responds that way is that it is conflating the
Speaker 2: algorithm's active speech with the individual's active speech. The late
Speaker 2: great Michael Brooks was right. We must be ruthless to
Speaker 2: systems and kind to individuals. Audrey Lord was right, The
Speaker 2: master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. World history
Speaker 2: is filled with endless revolutionary actors who introduced complexity. Dota
Speaker 2: introduced complexity as it lampooned and critiqued fascism, using the
Speaker 2: optics that fascism put forth itself. Young people will watch
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain today and be like, I can't believe that
Speaker 2: people missed with the meaning of this was in two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven, and I'm like, oh, okay yet, Because
Speaker 2: we operated in an information ecosystem that did not corral
Speaker 2: us into self destructive literalism. Everybody was accustomed to regularly
Speaker 2: encountering online content that had not been free sorted to
Speaker 2: validate their most vulnerable biases and go to them into
Speaker 2: a codependent, voracious consumption experience around time, sucking content related
Speaker 2: to each bias. Some people will ask, well, why didn't
Speaker 2: you speak out more clearly at that time that you
Speaker 2: had this vision of chocolate rain being a ballad about
Speaker 2: institutional racism. And it's partly, not entirely, but partly because
Speaker 2: I knew it could be a trojan horse, and I
Speaker 2: knew that people making comedic parodies and saying, oh gosh,
Speaker 2: it's a fun silly song that I sing to my
Speaker 2: kid at bedtime was part of the penetration phase for
Speaker 2: that trojan horse, and it was not time for the
Speaker 2: soldiers to jump out. And by the way, because we
Speaker 2: live in extremely estranged and balkanized times now, that trojan
Speaker 2: horse approach is one of the only ways to raise
Speaker 2: the political consciousness of somebody who is a good person
Speaker 2: but who is not personally nor spiritually prepared to understand
Speaker 2: your worldview. The fact that social algorithms banning metaphor and
Speaker 2: nuance also serves to ban that slow crawl trojan horsing,
Speaker 2: which is literally the anthropological process by which new coalitions
Speaker 2: and new societies and new cultural meetings evolve. Needs that
Speaker 2: today's private sectors, search and social network oligarchies are injurious
Speaker 2: to humanity and how they operate. So if you are
Speaker 2: young and your entire life has been lived with this
Speaker 2: boot on your neck, this boot of engagement optimized algorithmic
Speaker 2: information feeds driven by search engine optimism, metadata and telemetry,
Speaker 2: you face an extra challenge in pursuing intellectual and creative liberation.
Speaker 2: As Ralph Ellison puts it, live in New York, but
Speaker 2: don't let New York live in you. As Henry Lewis
Speaker 2: Gates Junior writes about sophisticated African literary criticism through the
Speaker 2: signifying monkey and the Ruba trickster, signification is the performance
Speaker 2: of metaphor and lampooning established meaning and established power, the
Speaker 2: same way Noam Chomsky talks about how human beings themselves
Speaker 2: are wired for generative grammar and creating a structure whose
Speaker 2: meaning is not beholding to itself.
Speaker 3: And we'll be back soon with more from Taizon Day
Speaker 3: become back to sixteenth minute. I love my listeners so much,
Speaker 3: and by that I mean I was able to find
Speaker 3: someone to make an earn for my dad's ashes after
Speaker 3: putting out a call two weeks ago. Really impressive stuff,
Speaker 3: you guys. And here's more political theory from Tazon Day.
Speaker 2: You're just like that song. The revolution will not be televised. Well,
Speaker 2: today's revolution will not be hashtagged. It will not be trending,
Speaker 2: at least not uncentralized for profit engagement optimized search and
Speaker 2: social media. And let's pause a little bit. Let's back off,
Speaker 2: because I just made a bold claim. I said the
Speaker 2: revolution is impossible using today's privatized, centralized, oligarthic search and
Speaker 2: social media. The easiest counterpoint to that assertion is what
Speaker 2: about Occupy Wall Street? What about Black Lives Matter? What
Speaker 2: about me too? Those are fantastic counterpoints. And I want
Speaker 2: to go on a bit of a detour, and we
Speaker 2: are already in a detour, so it's kind of a
Speaker 2: detour inside of the detour. But this topic of movements,
Speaker 2: meanings and the structure of algorithmic social media sort of
Speaker 2: being like a goalie who intercepts every scoring kick in
Speaker 2: the effort to start revolution. It's worth exploring with real
Speaker 2: world examples. It's important to acknowledge that people have lived
Speaker 2: many different and oftentimes heroic stories, and that one perspective
Speaker 2: does not seek to steal valor nor confiscate well deserved
Speaker 2: praise for many different life arcs. I have to put
Speaker 2: that asterisk out there now before I even suggest that
Speaker 2: things might have an additional layer of meaning, because Internet
Speaker 2: algorithms mutilate any assertion that is part of an interrogative
Speaker 2: and misrepresents curiosity and exploration and dialectic as declarative and
Speaker 2: gospel in order to gaslight and agitate. By the way,
Speaker 2: a lot of y'all talk about representation as a social
Speaker 2: justice concept, and rightly so, but I'll just put out
Speaker 2: there as an aside that santactic misrepresentation might be the
Speaker 2: most consequential type of misrepresentation determining your future, because santactic
Speaker 2: misrepresentation by Internet algorithms acting on textual metadata is so
Speaker 2: insidious and the only way you can inoculate yourself against
Speaker 2: it is to be so educated that you can argue
Speaker 2: every position you agree with and disagree with better than
Speaker 2: its most passionate and educated and devoted acolyte. You got
Speaker 2: to intellectually be like Yoda from Star Wars. That's a
Speaker 2: part of Attack of the Clones that you missed if
Speaker 2: you didn't read the novelization is that Douk who had
Speaker 2: studied the dark side for ten years, and Yoda's like, surprise, motherfuck,
Speaker 2: I know the dark side better than you do. So say, hypothetically,
Speaker 2: you disagree with the libertarian, you disagree with the neoliberal,
Speaker 2: you better know the dark side better. So when they
Speaker 2: throw Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith and John
Speaker 2: Stuart Mill and Iron Rand and Milton Friedman and other
Speaker 2: astrology in your face, you can say, hey, I have
Speaker 2: that whole collection of tarot cards. I didn't realize we
Speaker 2: were having a horoscope battle today. But you are going down.
Speaker 2: That's the aside. I'm like Olive Garden. Sometimes the sides
Speaker 2: fill you up more than the main course. So keeping
Speaker 2: our eye on the ball, I said, the revolution will
Speaker 2: not be hashtagged, It will not be trending. A lot
Speaker 2: of these terms that trend on social media and become
Speaker 2: the names of movements are sort of euphemistic. They are
Speaker 2: integrationist euphemisms to describe revolutionary causes. To me, Integrationist means
Speaker 2: that justice will be achieved by augmenting, remodeling established power,
Speaker 2: usually without changing its stakeholders. Revolutionary means we've got to
Speaker 2: re imagine established power in its stakeholders, which is often
Speaker 2: state power, the power of government. Martin Luther King Junior
Speaker 2: is a revolutionary who got backpedaled and celebrated as an integrationist.
Speaker 2: He was condemned around the time of his death by
Speaker 2: a lot of persisting media brands that you've engaged with.
Speaker 2: They call them a trader and a communist in a while,
Speaker 2: relic for talking about oligarchy and militarism. That's not what
Speaker 2: you learned in grade school. You learned that he had
Speaker 2: a dream and did the March on Washington where he
Speaker 2: dreamed of integrating consumerism and public access, and then the
Speaker 2: curriculaments until you go to college. That integrationist caricature of
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King Junior has other lies that piggyback on it,
Speaker 2: like the only black revolutionary discourse during the Civil Rights
Speaker 2: movement was militants black panthers, sometimes the black nationalists. I
Speaker 2: call attention to that false binary because it gets carried
Speaker 2: forward into the overten window of acceptability of what is
Speaker 2: allowed to trend on social media. Just replace Martin Luther
Speaker 2: King and the Black Panthers with the term Occupy Wall
Speaker 2: Street and the lyrics of Boots Riley, We've got the guillotine,
Speaker 2: you better run. I love Occupy Wall Street, I love
Speaker 2: Boots Riley. But in between them, are we questioning meritocracy?
Speaker 2: Are we questioning perpetual growth? Are we questioning corporate personhood?
Speaker 2: Are we questioning fractional reserve banking? And I'm not discounting
Speaker 2: that acolytes are, But I'm talking about what trends widely,
Speaker 2: And many will point out that there's more specific critiques
Speaker 2: concerns that are kind of implied by Occupy Wall Street
Speaker 2: are not themselves trending more widely because they're more niche.
Speaker 2: I would say, thank you, that's exactly my point. Do
Speaker 2: you think Chris Crocker screaming and leave Brittany alone was
Speaker 2: not niche when it trended in the summer of two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven. The knowledge ecosystem in which chocolate Rain
Speaker 2: trended was one in which niche content and niche concepts
Speaker 2: were allowed to reach a large, undifferentiated audience. But more
Speaker 2: than that, Occupy Wall Street is also quite literal. Its
Speaker 2: politics are not hidden. It's the santactic pineapples on pizza,
Speaker 2: you know it when you see it, and you love
Speaker 2: it or you hate it metaphor and having soldiers to
Speaker 2: jump out of your conceptual trojan horse once it penetrates.
Speaker 2: That requires figurative and widely discordant meaning, which is the
Speaker 2: antithesis of literal meaning. So, in summary, between the literal
Speaker 2: and broad trend of Occupy Wall Street and the militant
Speaker 2: revolutionary literalism of Boots Riley, there is niche and figurative
Speaker 2: meeting that is not as able to trend on algorithmic
Speaker 2: social media. Black Lives Matter is a wonderful example of
Speaker 2: literal meeting, as well as important heroic historic accomplishments in
Speaker 2: public education, policy implementation, and policy discourse now zooming out.
Speaker 2: Speaking about race is always this sort of awkward cohabitation
Speaker 2: because you are speaking about socioeconomic reality that correlates with
Speaker 2: biological fiction. I especially think that Black Lives Matter makes
Speaker 2: a great juxtaposition with Chocolate Rain because they exist on
Speaker 2: opposite sides of this divide where algorithmic social media took
Speaker 2: over the world. Chocolate Rain could not have thrived in
Speaker 2: the social media ecosystem six years later, and Black Lives
Speaker 2: Matter could not have thrived in the social media ecosystem
Speaker 2: six years before. Both Chocolate Rain and Black Lives Matter
Speaker 2: are so of torch, bearing of a very established discourse
Speaker 2: and even disagreement about black identity and black activism. I
Speaker 2: mentioned Ralph Ellison earlier, and I think that conceptualizing Chocolate
Speaker 2: Rain as a trojan horse, as something that was not
Speaker 2: averse to reframing and appropriation as its spread its message,
Speaker 2: is very in line with an Elisonian perspective on racial identity.
Speaker 2: This perspective is captured in Ralph Ellison's best known novel
Speaker 2: Invisible Man, and we'll come back to that in a minute.
Speaker 2: In contrast to Chocolate Rain and Ralph Ellison, Black Lives
Speaker 2: Matter makes me think of Richard Wright's Native Son, another
Speaker 2: legendary essential work of American literature. One way that a
Speaker 2: black life matters to Richard Wright, through his protagonist Bigger Thomas,
Speaker 2: is to tell a racist society, you need to see
Speaker 2: a rational actor who is responding intelligently and logically within
Speaker 2: that you pathologize, because that is the only way to
Speaker 2: complete the consciousness journey of seeing yourselves. Richard Wright might
Speaker 2: even say that pathology satirizes the pathologizer. The way a
Speaker 2: black life matters to Ralph Ellison is very different because
Speaker 2: he believes being black gives you one side of an
Speaker 2: important Hegelian dialectic that exposes the world to you through juxtaposition.
Speaker 2: Crudely put, a dialectic is arriving at truth through an
Speaker 2: argument between opposites. The outsiderness of blackness, being the opposite
Speaker 2: of presumption, gets deployed by Ellison as a destoue feel
Speaker 2: like ethnographic superpower. Ralph Ellison would say that all of
Speaker 2: these identities that people ascribe to themselves, racial identity, political identity,
Speaker 2: they're all like imaginary friends, and all of you people
Speaker 2: who reduce your identity to a monolithic dogma, are like
Speaker 2: children sucking on different flavors of as a fire. And
Speaker 2: it is intellectually exhausting to be around you. And the
Speaker 2: only liberation for an enlightened individual is to understand that
Speaker 2: the human species is like an ongoing aluminum fire between
Speaker 2: structuralist identities held by passionate, dogmatic, and misinformed individuals. You
Speaker 2: can't put out an aluminum fire. All you can do
Speaker 2: is stay far enough away and maybe get a long
Speaker 2: pole to make some s'mores. Now here's the takeaway. The
Speaker 2: other thing, I'll notice that regardless of what one believes
Speaker 2: on any topic, they are always going to be able
Speaker 2: to find individual cases, individual stories that bolster their position
Speaker 2: and discredit the opposition. That's the case with all three
Speaker 2: of these. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Me too.
Speaker 2: Everybody can build or find a feed that cherry picks
Speaker 2: truthful content that confirms their biases, regardless of proportion. One
Speaker 2: reason it is so important that revolutionary messaging that creates
Speaker 2: Tiak's power is not gate kept from reaching a wide
Speaker 2: audience is that the more characters you put in the
Speaker 2: story of a critique, for example, Everybody, the harder facts
Speaker 2: are to discredit. Okay, I'm done. That's the button, the
Speaker 2: theoretical button on the interaction I had with my father
Speaker 2: at age twenty one and my answer to the question
Speaker 2: of why did the language of Belle Hooks white supremacist,
Speaker 2: capitalist patriarchy make my father cry in that moment, I
Speaker 2: think that groundwork helps contextualize a lot of the rest
Speaker 2: of the story. Holy moly, I'm looking back, that's like
Speaker 2: twenty nine minutes of groundwork for when I was twelve
Speaker 2: minutes into this. This is why I cannot make friends,
Speaker 2: because that's exactly who I am on dating apps, and
Speaker 2: if you get to know me, I am the four
Speaker 2: thousand word message. I just had a thought or two
Speaker 2: with citations. They should add that to the matchmaking criteria.
Speaker 2: Sperm banks. No he's not six feet tall. No he's
Speaker 2: not a millionaire. Yeah, he sends really long text messages
Speaker 2: that are widely cited, and he does it at the
Speaker 2: least appropriate times, like during the middle of movies and
Speaker 2: at birthday parties. I should totally put that in my
Speaker 2: hinge bio. Now, my biggest problem with the dating apps
Speaker 2: is that questioning is not a category. Asexually, romatic is
Speaker 2: not a category, and this kind of goes along with
Speaker 2: being questioning. I've been publicly questioning for all of my
Speaker 2: public life, and I've had a partner too, though not
Speaker 2: really any lasting relationships. I used to think that having
Speaker 2: a high partner count was somehow this clarifying thing, but
Speaker 2: I know people who are on the hundreds from all
Speaker 2: over the human and situational buffet and they still have
Speaker 2: no clue what they're into. I'm definitely sapey as sexual.
Speaker 2: I'm attracted to intellect, although I'm also not like a
Speaker 2: lot of career intellectuals. You know that term interdisciplinary. I'm
Speaker 2: enter undisciplinary. I'm supposed to be getting back to the
Speaker 2: story of my career, aren't I. You can tell when
Speaker 2: my ADHD medication does like fuck. Therefore we left the bloodstream.
Speaker 2: He's on his own.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much again to Taizon Day, whose social
Speaker 3: media you can find in the description. And now that
Speaker 3: you're fully dialed in, now that you are well aware
Speaker 3: that in the context of Tay Or Adam Bonner's life,
Speaker 3: that Chocolate Rain was but a chapter in his larger
Speaker 3: political education. Next week he's gonna share his story up
Speaker 3: until today. And if you're a person on the internet,
Speaker 3: which face it you are, you too could unwittingly become
Speaker 3: a main character. And Tay's insight and wisdom on the
Speaker 3: topic twenty years on is well worth hearing. That's next
Speaker 3: week on. Sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 4: Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and
Speaker 4: iHeart Radios. It is written, posted, and produced by me
Speaker 4: Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: He amazing. Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 3: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 3: from Brant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
Speaker 3: producer Anderson, my Kats Flee and Casper and my pet Rockbird,
Speaker 3: who will outlive us all Bye.