Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to woke F Daily with
Speaker 1: me your girl, Danielle Moody recording from the Long Island Bunker.
Speaker 1: You know, I often say to you that you need
Speaker 1: to take a break so that you do not have
Speaker 1: a breakdown. And with all of the compacted crises that
Speaker 1: we are dealing with at this time and making the
Speaker 1: march to midterms, there never seems like the right time
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Speaker 1: to make that time. And so for me, dear friends
Speaker 1: here on woke F, I am going to be taking
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Speaker 1: so you never miss a new episode. Folks, I am
Speaker 1: so excited to welcome to wok F, I believe for
Speaker 1: the first time, friend Philip Atiba Goff, who is the
Speaker 1: CEO of Policing Equity. Philip, you must be busy, I mean,
Speaker 1: because police in America are clearly clearly out of goddamn control.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many more mornings we need to
Speaker 1: wake up to another shooting of another unarmed black person
Speaker 1: or person of color. I don't know how many more
Speaker 1: headlines we need. It's like we are interrupting the Derek
Speaker 1: Chauvin trial, then to interrupt it to tell us about
Speaker 1: Dante Wright to then interrupt it to tell us about
Speaker 1: Adam Toledo, to then interrupt it to tell us, what,
Speaker 1: how are you feeling right now about what is unfolding
Speaker 1: in America? I think I'm feeling what most folks are feeling,
Speaker 1: or many folks are feeling. I'm feeling tired right like.
Speaker 1: It's just it's exhausting. I know that. When Adam Toledo
Speaker 1: video came out, the first version I saw, the unaddited version,
Speaker 1: I was done. I had to shut it down for
Speaker 1: a little bit because it's it's just exhausting. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how hard you work right now, there's no way
Speaker 1: to stop the next one. You're hoping to stop one
Speaker 1: like twenty or thirty or forty killings down the road
Speaker 1: just turned turned down the spigot a little bit, so
Speaker 1: it's less. And it's when you're seeing the full volume
Speaker 1: of it, as we've been seeing for the last couple
Speaker 1: of days. It's a hard thing to get up to
Speaker 1: to be like, I'm going to make a dent on this,
Speaker 1: and yet that's the thing you gotta do, because if
Speaker 1: you're not making a dent, then it won't change at all.
Speaker 1: I have been questioning myself as my listeners know over
Speaker 1: the past year, the past several months, about whether or
Speaker 1: not anything that I do matters, right, Like, the whole
Speaker 1: point of woke app is to provide a platform and
Speaker 1: a space for us to have more than soundbites, for
Speaker 1: us to have real conversations about the issues that are
Speaker 1: affecting our everyday lives. And it just seems that every
Speaker 1: day I pick up the microphone, I have more bad
Speaker 1: news to report. And so what does it feel like
Speaker 1: for you? You work with police, you work with police
Speaker 1: departments across this country? What is the problem? Phillip? Like,
Speaker 1: what is the problem? Where is the problem? Because if
Speaker 1: I hear one more time that there are just a
Speaker 1: few bad apples, when I'm lying, how many bad apple
Speaker 1: spoils the entire goddamn orchard? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, like,
Speaker 1: it's not an apple, it's not a tree, it's the
Speaker 1: entire orchard is rotten. How are you maintaining your hope
Speaker 1: around reform? So the word reform has a tricky meaning
Speaker 1: right now in that it's contrasted oftentimes and rightly oftentimes,
Speaker 1: to abolition. The ideas reform is about changing the stuff
Speaker 1: that we have and the stuff that we have. Part
Speaker 1: of the reason why it's so frustrating is because it's
Speaker 1: doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not that it's it needs some tweaks, and it's
Speaker 1: dented and it's bruised, and so we just need to
Speaker 1: refurbish policing. It's like, no, no, no, These killings have
Speaker 1: been part of the mission. So that's not the goal.
Speaker 1: To be clear, that was never the goal. The goal
Speaker 1: was harm reduction until we can open up the prospect
Speaker 1: of ridding ourselves of the addiction to punishment that we've got.
Speaker 1: So we've had in our mind a medical model since
Speaker 1: jump right, this country is addicted to punishment as the
Speaker 1: way out of difficult social problems. It's in part because
Speaker 1: we are sort of genetically predisposed as a country to
Speaker 1: lie about our history. That's why we're having That's why
Speaker 1: we had fights about the Confederacy immediately after the uprisings
Speaker 1: in George Floyd. Right, those things don't automatically make sense
Speaker 1: next to each other unless you understand it's the lies
Speaker 1: about our history that make our pre isn't possible. So
Speaker 1: a year ago, year and a half ago, we could
Speaker 1: push and push and push and say, you understand, it's
Speaker 1: way worse than the couple of videos that you saw. Right.
Speaker 1: There are cities across this country that used to have
Speaker 1: and I pray to God that they don't do it anymore,
Speaker 1: but they used to have a policy where law enforcement
Speaker 1: could conduct field cavity searches. What field in outside cavity searches. Now,
Speaker 1: if you and I were to perform a field cavity search,
Speaker 1: that's just sexual assault. And yet law enforcement undercover of
Speaker 1: law they'd be like, well, I search you, and I
Speaker 1: somehow know you have drugs. I somehow know you might
Speaker 1: have a weapon. So it can get way worse. We
Speaker 1: haven't talked about what happened recover. We haven't talked about
Speaker 1: what happens when we do investigations of sex trafficking. There's
Speaker 1: not video of that. To talk about the places where
Speaker 1: women are, particularly where trans folks are particularly vulnerable to
Speaker 1: the abuses of the state, we haven't begun to get
Speaker 1: at it. Today there is news of a city asking
Speaker 1: to avoid four hundred convictions, four hundred convictions, not charges,
Speaker 1: convictions because one officer lied over the course of three years,
Speaker 1: four hundred lives that at the very least have finds
Speaker 1: they have to pay, but most of them are in
Speaker 1: cages as a result of one officer line, we haven't
Speaker 1: begun to scratch the surface. And the thing that I
Speaker 1: want people who are really pissed off about policing to
Speaker 1: understand is it's not just the police. The conversation about
Speaker 1: defund the police happens after defundmental health, which wasn't so
Speaker 1: much a popular After defund education, defund programs, defund hospitals,
Speaker 1: defund green spaces, defund urban renewal. In not the gentrification sense,
Speaker 1: in the sense of don't let the houses drop down
Speaker 1: and fall down on the babies. We've defunded absolutely everything
Speaker 1: in these communities. So the only public resource we have
Speaker 1: left is the police. And the logic has been, well,
Speaker 1: we have to because look at the crime as opposed
Speaker 1: to look what we did to create the crime happen, Philip,
Speaker 1: because that is my thing, Like you have said everything
Speaker 1: that I have been questioning, right, which is we've created
Speaker 1: these problems, right, And I continue to say that our
Speaker 1: criminal justice system, poverty, all of these things are functioning
Speaker 1: the way that they were meant to function. Right. The
Speaker 1: idea behind all of this was that we defund every
Speaker 1: public good, every social service, and so that we can
Speaker 1: turn this prison industrial complex into the moneymaker that it is.
Speaker 1: For those folks that are like, because when your incentive
Speaker 1: is to increase prisons so that you can increase profit,
Speaker 1: that's the trickle down. That's the only trickle down that
Speaker 1: we've ever felt in this country. Right, And so it's like,
Speaker 1: if you know what the problem is, how do you
Speaker 1: create the will in order to fix the problem. So,
Speaker 1: for better or for worse, I want to offer a
Speaker 1: friendly amendment on the profit motive because right now we're
Speaker 1: talking about a little bit about fines and fees. I
Speaker 1: think that the story of Ferguson is not fully told,
Speaker 1: and that's to our detriment because when the federal government
Speaker 1: came in and said, y'all are using fines and fees
Speaker 1: to tax poor black people, Ferguson literally said, well, if
Speaker 1: we can't use racist fines and fees, how can we
Speaker 1: fund the city bankrupt if we didn't have racism. So
Speaker 1: we need to be talking about the people that was
Speaker 1: literally their responsible. We'd go bankrupt if we couldn't tax
Speaker 1: poor black people. But private prisons and the profit motive
Speaker 1: within policing is a smaller portion than is easy to
Speaker 1: comprehend the bigger game. We just want to throw these
Speaker 1: people away. That whiteness says, this set of problems is
Speaker 1: just it's too it's ikey. I don't want to have
Speaker 1: anything to do with it. And so when it's in
Speaker 1: folks faces, you'll see a little bit of movement. But
Speaker 1: the movement isn't to solve the problem. The movement is
Speaker 1: to make that discomfort go away. And so what we're
Speaker 1: getting right now is electeds and corporations. Like I loved
Speaker 1: all the corporate speak this summer. We're like, we stand
Speaker 1: with black lives. We're gonna fund voter suppression in Georgia,
Speaker 1: but we stand with black lives. It's to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: It's to get rid of the discomfort. The way you
Speaker 1: move it forward is you don't let them. So all
Speaker 1: the folks who are out here saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: defund is radical, or we don't want to you know,
Speaker 1: we're pushing too hard. That's too. That's two out there.
Speaker 1: I need those folks to sit down, because two out
Speaker 1: there is what opened the window for what's possible right now. Now,
Speaker 1: the folks who come in who know how to actually
Speaker 1: make moves and get stuff done to make these these
Speaker 1: moments of fashion into real sustainable policy. They need to
Speaker 1: have access too. It's gonna take a lot of hands.
Speaker 1: But they don't rage so hard crowd. They need to
Speaker 1: have a seat, But they don't rage so hard crowd.
Speaker 1: They do have a seat, Philip. They have a seat
Speaker 1: in Congress, you know what I'm saying, Like, they do
Speaker 1: have a seat. They sit and write in Congress telling
Speaker 1: us all of the things that they can't get done,
Speaker 1: all of the things that they can't work on because
Speaker 1: it's too big, because it's too hard, all of the
Speaker 1: things that you're saying. So if the people that we
Speaker 1: need to stand up are actually sitting down in Congress
Speaker 1: not doing a goddamn thing while we have extraditional killings
Speaker 1: every single goddamn day in this country, then where do
Speaker 1: we go. No, it's fair because they don't just sit
Speaker 1: in Congress. They also sit in boardrooms, you know, in
Speaker 1: corporate decision making positions the thousand percent, and they sit
Speaker 1: they sit at a decision making a nonprofit profits and
Speaker 1: philanthropy as well, a thousand percent. What I mean is
Speaker 1: they need to have a seat facing the wall like
Speaker 1: that they can sit yes with the duns add on. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: But I will say say, in all of that frustration,
Speaker 1: thousands of municipalities around the country are actually doing something different,
Speaker 1: and it's hard for journalists to get together and wrap
Speaker 1: their minds around it because it does look super different.
Speaker 1: So you saw for a little while a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff on replacing law enforcement with mental health. That's still
Speaker 1: going great, that's still a good story, and they're still momentum.
Speaker 1: You're now seeing a couple stories come out about reducing
Speaker 1: low level traffic enforcement so that Dante Wright didn't have
Speaker 1: to die. That's also going on. But there are thousands
Speaker 1: of experiments happening across the country in municipalities. There's one
Speaker 1: in particular that it brought me to tears in the
Speaker 1: good way for like the first time in months. What's
Speaker 1: going on in Ithaca and Tompkins County is possibly breathtaking
Speaker 1: and a model for how we go about doing this.
Speaker 1: So in Ithaca they came, they came to the Center
Speaker 1: for Policing Equity and to community folks, they said, we
Speaker 1: need to do something radically different, and we can. We're
Speaker 1: doing okay right now, and if so if we can't
Speaker 1: make it happen, who can't. And what they did They
Speaker 1: went through a nine month process. They got the high
Speaker 1: school students involved, right in senior thesis on this. They
Speaker 1: got the local communes, not just Cornell, but if you
Speaker 1: are college, they got the college kids involved. They had
Speaker 1: the janitors involved, They had folks who were formerly incarcerated
Speaker 1: and involved. And on the other end of that process,
Speaker 1: they gave to Governor Cromo. Because the New York State,
Speaker 1: everybody has to have a plan for public safety. They
Speaker 1: gave them a plan that dismantles their police department and
Speaker 1: puts in its place a Department of Community Solutions and
Speaker 1: Public Safety that is majority unarmed, civilian led, no armed
Speaker 1: response to non violent calls for crisis and standing up
Speaker 1: social services so that communities can keep themselves safe instead
Speaker 1: of calling out for it. There is no more police department.
Speaker 1: At the end of this process, there is a Department
Speaker 1: of Community Solutions and Public Safety led by civilians staffed,
Speaker 1: majority unarmed, that will go to ninety six percent of
Speaker 1: the calls for service in Ithaca and Tompkins County. Wow,
Speaker 1: good news, And we got to protect those things because
Speaker 1: I understand Ithaca is not the center of black trauma,
Speaker 1: right right for a couple of black kids who went
Speaker 1: to Cornell, and you know, like, I can't help it, right, right,
Speaker 1: But it can be a model for how we set
Speaker 1: it up because once you see it can be done,
Speaker 1: then you start removing the excuses for not doing it.
Speaker 1: So then talk to me. But here come the excuses, right,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, can we do that in New
Speaker 1: York City? Can we do that in Minneapolis? Can we
Speaker 1: do that in these places where we're seeing the cops
Speaker 1: literally run rampant, right, like run rough shot, like there's
Speaker 1: some type of mob. Can we do it in places
Speaker 1: that do have violent crime? So I get that question,
Speaker 1: and it's in order to do it, the larger it goes.
Speaker 1: But there's no like, it's the same basic budget process.
Speaker 1: It's just larger. Right. You have worse union issues, but
Speaker 1: they're just bigger, and that means there's more people who
Speaker 1: can stand up and say no, we insist. And remember,
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis it might be hard, but in Brooklyn Center
Speaker 1: it's not. Saint Louis it might be hard, but in
Speaker 1: Ferguson it's not. These killings are happening in the suburbs
Speaker 1: of surrounding YEP, and they have much smaller departments. Right,
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies in the United States, seventy
Speaker 1: five of them have twenty five or fewer officers, and
Speaker 1: there's a thousand that are just one. Dude, those can
Speaker 1: be transformed and or removed overnight. M you know, I
Speaker 1: want to switch gears a little bit to talk about
Speaker 1: what happens to officers that are charged. And as we're
Speaker 1: watching the Derek Chauvin trial unfold, and we know that
Speaker 1: Kim Potter has been charged with second degree manslaughter in
Speaker 1: the what I will refer to as the murder of
Speaker 1: Dante Bright, tell us why it is so goddamn difficult
Speaker 1: for us to convict officers. Tell us why we need
Speaker 1: eighty seven videos with every single vantage point possible. And
Speaker 1: we still don't know with certainty that an officer will
Speaker 1: be charged with the crimes that they commit. If your
Speaker 1: boss tells you to write them a memo, and you
Speaker 1: write them a memo and give it to them, how
Speaker 1: likely are you to get fired for that? Like, not
Speaker 1: at all, because you did what the boss told you
Speaker 1: to do. Yeah, that's the answer to this. The boss,
Speaker 1: folks in charge of law enforcement are largely happy with
Speaker 1: what law enforcement has been doing, so they oftentimes don't
Speaker 1: want to see how the sausage gets made. They don't
Speaker 1: want to see the literal. But you had to actually
Speaker 1: kill him and his hands were up and he was thirteen.
Speaker 1: That feels itchy. Let's do something so I don't have
Speaker 1: to feel icky. But the idea of keeping whiteness safe
Speaker 1: from black and brown people and for the set of
Speaker 1: terror options we've given to folks who experience concentrated disadvantage,
Speaker 1: and that's what they were supposed to do. So they
Speaker 1: show up with the advantage of faith and trust from
Speaker 1: communities that like what the outcome has been. So on
Speaker 1: one level, there's a very simple answer for why we
Speaker 1: don't get convictions. It's because the system is working as
Speaker 1: it's supposed to. It won't convict someone of something that
Speaker 1: it wants people to do. And where are we with
Speaker 1: qualified immunity right, Where where are we with being able
Speaker 1: to at least get to some type of level playing
Speaker 1: ground where you don't have this get out of jail
Speaker 1: free card. Yeah, so unqualified immunity. There are states that
Speaker 1: are making changes, they're saying they're abolishing it. That's not
Speaker 1: quite right. What they're doing is they're changing the standard
Speaker 1: for it, which should be useful on state cases and
Speaker 1: can be useful on local cases. But we're not close
Speaker 1: from any of the states. As examples, the Justice for
Speaker 1: Justice and Police saying George Floyd Act would end in
Speaker 1: this current iteration, would end qualified immunity, and I think
Speaker 1: that has a shot of making it through the Senate.
Speaker 1: So in that case, we would be in fact revealing
Speaker 1: the precedent and saying, no, you cannot use it this way.
Speaker 1: But qualified immunity might might make a difference in about
Speaker 1: a quarter of the cases that come forward where they're charging.
Speaker 1: So even those things that are that are sort of
Speaker 1: easy villains in this fight, the real villain here is
Speaker 1: the way we use police. So if most cities ninety
Speaker 1: six percent of what police do has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with violence, do you think we could figure out a
Speaker 1: way to spend less and get less armed response for
Speaker 1: that ninety six percent of behavior. So I'd be happily
Speaker 1: qualified immunity in place if police had ninety six percent
Speaker 1: less contact with folks, Right, Like, if all I'm trying
Speaker 1: to do is reduce the number of bodies going to
Speaker 1: the Morgus a result of contact with the state. That
Speaker 1: seems like the bigger lever to pull is to pull
Speaker 1: police out of the places where, by the way, for
Speaker 1: the last quarter century, they've been saying, we can't do this.
Speaker 1: You give us too much. We can't do mental health
Speaker 1: and substance abuse and homelessness and child welfare. Why do
Speaker 1: you give all that to us? Right, So they want
Speaker 1: to get out of the business. They just want to
Speaker 1: do it without losing their budgets. Right, I'm happy to
Speaker 1: law enforcement to get them out of the places they
Speaker 1: always wanted to get out of. And in many cities,
Speaker 1: by the way, we should be standing up those systems
Speaker 1: before we're disinvesting, so we can we can invest before
Speaker 1: we divest in some places. But it's got to be
Speaker 1: push pull, because we have fed this beast so much
Speaker 1: that if they were the military, US law enforcement would
Speaker 1: be the third largest military in the world after our
Speaker 1: military and then China's military. That's too much, which is
Speaker 1: obscene when you look at the lack of money we
Speaker 1: put into let's say education, right, like you judge a
Speaker 1: country by where they put the most of their resources,
Speaker 1: and like you said at the beginning, America is addicted
Speaker 1: right to locking people up, and it's no wonder to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, we would rather in America send children to
Speaker 1: school with bulletproof backpacks, armed teachers, then do something substantive
Speaker 1: on gun reform. We'd rather have a Dante right a
Speaker 1: week or a day, then admit to the fact that
Speaker 1: our policing system is absolutely atrocious and if it didn't
Speaker 1: have a badge, would be considered the KKK in terms
Speaker 1: of the number of black people that they murder on
Speaker 1: a regular basis. I just you know, what expectation do
Speaker 1: you have of this current administration to be able to
Speaker 1: move the ball forward with this systemic problem that we have.
Speaker 1: It will really depend to me on who they get
Speaker 1: through Senate confirmation. The Senate confirmed nominees right now are
Speaker 1: of fantastic slate of folks that are way bolder in
Speaker 1: terms of their vision for what can be done than
Speaker 1: this president campaigned on. So we get Kristin Clark, and
Speaker 1: we get Vinita Gupta, and we get Anne Milgram has
Speaker 1: had a da that's good for the set of things
Speaker 1: I care about. Vinita Gupta was the best thing that
Speaker 1: had happened to the Civil Rights Division in at least
Speaker 1: a generation and for her to come up and then
Speaker 1: have Kristin Clark take that over a Senate confirmed. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not just history setting. It sets a table for
Speaker 1: removal qualified immunity, for really ramping up what investigations look
Speaker 1: like a civil rights for expanding how civil rights investigations
Speaker 1: of law enforcement actually go into the full municipality. Right,
Speaker 1: because before the Ferguson report, no one was talking about
Speaker 1: how cities generate revenue. So how much more cans of
Speaker 1: folks who are really credential to have some experience, how
Speaker 1: much more could they do? And also I want us
Speaker 1: to be thinking about what are we going to make
Speaker 1: them do? Because under Obama, what we did was we said,
Speaker 1: there's a black dude there right blaze basketball. We like
Speaker 1: his march madness, his wife is wonderful, his kids are wonderful.
Speaker 1: Let's not embarrass him, let's not put him in bad spots.
Speaker 1: And so we didn't push. I'm not saying that's what
Speaker 1: I thought. I'm not saying this what everybody thought. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: But I mean, but that's right. But that's right. There's
Speaker 1: no reason not to push Uncle Joe. There's just not
Speaker 1: And so I want to say, what are we going
Speaker 1: to insist on? And I hope we insist on the
Speaker 1: recognition nationwide that we have a system that punishes people
Speaker 1: for the choices they make in a context where we
Speaker 1: have given them only terrible options. So we should be
Speaker 1: giving them better options before we even talk about how
Speaker 1: we want to ratch it up punishment. Last question for you,
Speaker 1: fill Up is this, do you feel like we need
Speaker 1: to change our messaging around defund the police, around abolish
Speaker 1: the police? Do you think that the messaging is off
Speaker 1: or do you think that it's right where it needs
Speaker 1: to be. So this conversation around messaging, I actually think
Speaker 1: it is super duper important because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: assumptions that have gone into it when we've had it
Speaker 1: in public. So members of what i'll call a democratic
Speaker 1: establishment have said, well, we can't be making this defund demand.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculous. It's killing us electorally. Be like you were
Speaker 1: not one's making it. It wasn't for you. It was
Speaker 1: activating folks who were outraged and felt like what on
Speaker 1: earth can I do? Like you and I were saying
Speaker 1: and feeling at the very beginning of this conversation, those
Speaker 1: folks are like you, know what. Yeah, I'm not up
Speaker 1: for reform. I'm up for just getting rid of this
Speaker 1: because it's actually killing us. So if folks want to
Speaker 1: have different messaging, feel free to develop some. That's how
Speaker 1: I feel about. It's like, so we all of us,
Speaker 1: we're not messaging the same thing. So I hearing abolition
Speaker 1: that's talking about I want to talk about refund, not
Speaker 1: defund refund to the community. I hear abolition is saying that,
Speaker 1: Oh right, that feels good to me. But you know what,
Speaker 1: defund is still working in places. And I also, I know,
Speaker 1: like you said last question, I'm gonna trying not to
Speaker 1: be too prof come on now. But my deal is
Speaker 1: we think of abolition right now like it's some's something
Speaker 1: brand new, okay. And then some folks are like, oh,
Speaker 1: Miriam cob has been around for a little while, Yes
Speaker 1: she has, she's been doing it. And then something were like, well,
Speaker 1: Angela Davis been around for a little while. Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: But Angela Davis, when she is summarizing a great portion
Speaker 1: of her life's work in two thousand and five, writes
Speaker 1: a book called Abolition Democracy. She is quoting from W. E. B.
Speaker 1: Du Bois writing in nineteen thirty five about black reconstruction.
Speaker 1: This thing goes back to the point of emancipation, when
Speaker 1: we have black geniuses talking about not just the destruction
Speaker 1: of the systems that kill us, but the proactive, affirmative
Speaker 1: construction of systems that will keep us safe and that
Speaker 1: will rip the body politic of the toxins of historical
Speaker 1: legacies of racism. Abolition is not just about getting rid
Speaker 1: of something. It's about standing up something that's better than
Speaker 1: what we've had. And when we have a more historically
Speaker 1: literate appreciation for what that word means, I think it
Speaker 1: stops being so scary and starts being a bit inevitable.
Speaker 1: You know, you're so right on so many things. What
Speaker 1: makes me discourage, though, is that we're a nation that
Speaker 1: is illiterate about our own history, about our own lives,
Speaker 1: about the lives of our neighbors. We are pissfully ignorant,
Speaker 1: and so for every issue that we have, there is
Speaker 1: a re education that needs to happen, because the way
Speaker 1: that we have been educated is through the lie. I
Speaker 1: keep saying that the big lie wasn't just about election fraud.
Speaker 1: The big lie has been what we've been teaching in
Speaker 1: public schools since the beginning of time, right, And so
Speaker 1: it's just like, you know, you make sense if you
Speaker 1: were to take things into historical contests and actually understand
Speaker 1: the context of the words that we are using. But
Speaker 1: my fear for America is that we continually show our
Speaker 1: ass and our celebratory around just how ignorant we are.
Speaker 1: And so if that be the case, Philip, it's like,
Speaker 1: do we ever see the needle move right? If we're
Speaker 1: in a constant state of having to go back and
Speaker 1: re educate folks and bring them up to where they
Speaker 1: should be, are we ever moving forward if I got
Speaker 1: to keep looking back? Yeah, I understand and the frustration.
Speaker 1: And so let's say there's two options. There's a yes
Speaker 1: and there's a no. If the answer is no, then
Speaker 1: what we're doing just give up? I should I should
Speaker 1: become a black person who says that black people just
Speaker 1: need to pull the pants up and that will get
Speaker 1: all the shootings are because there's money in that, for sure,
Speaker 1: O percent. You could be rich on Fox News go
Speaker 1: ahead if you didn't care about a conscience or Yeah,
Speaker 1: like if I didn't have a soul, I could just
Speaker 1: do that. And so I answer yes both because I
Speaker 1: see change happening, and I watch the genius of communities
Speaker 1: coming together and saying we will demand better, we will
Speaker 1: insist on more, and because that is the only option
Speaker 1: that makes living the way that I'm trying to live
Speaker 1: makes sense, living with any kind of hope, looking at
Speaker 1: babies and saying not just I'm sorry for what we're
Speaker 1: giving you, but I think you can make this place better,
Speaker 1: literally looking at my God and saying that that it's
Speaker 1: required for me to believe it can be and to
Speaker 1: work so that that's true. Now, I believe that optimism
Speaker 1: in the face of reality is a revolutionary act, and
Speaker 1: I try and be a little bit of a revolutionary
Speaker 1: every day. Right. So I'm not trying to sugarcoat stuff.
Speaker 1: But if we're talking about is it possible, Slavery wasn't
Speaker 1: ended till it was, right, Voting rights weren't secured un
Speaker 1: till they were now they're not. We're gonna do it again, right,
Speaker 1: all the things that weren't possible you think about it.
Speaker 1: The moon was just something up in the sky for
Speaker 1: a long time throughout all of human history, and then
Speaker 1: a small group of folks got a bunch of resources
Speaker 1: and the will of the people to say, let's go.
Speaker 1: And now that's a thing that probably in the next
Speaker 1: twenty years you can buy a ticket to buy a
Speaker 1: ticket to the moon. This thing that doesn't have oxygen
Speaker 1: doesn't exist within our earth. The things that humanity can
Speaker 1: do when we decide it is required are amazing. We
Speaker 1: dream about technology, and we dream about power, But when
Speaker 1: do we dream about a better society? What does democracy
Speaker 1: look like twenty thirty forty one hundred, five hundred years
Speaker 1: from now? How have we set ourselves up to be better?
Speaker 1: When we start dreaming about freedom not just for ourselves,
Speaker 1: but as the root construct of what we're going to
Speaker 1: gift to the next generation. I imagine that we can
Speaker 1: take ourselves to the Moon, to Mars, to solar systems
Speaker 1: we can't even see with the naked eye. In terms
Speaker 1: of how we keep ourselves safe. I know that's possible,
Speaker 1: because humanity does the impossible all the goddamn time. It's
Speaker 1: just we've done it for the wrong reasons and for
Speaker 1: the wrong set of people. Philip Gough, you know you
Speaker 1: continue to do the good work, preach the good message
Speaker 1: because folks like me and my listeners here at woke
Speaker 1: AF we need all of the hopefulness and the faith
Speaker 1: that we can muster because the times are pressing, and
Speaker 1: they are pressing us into the ground. But you are right.
Speaker 1: We are nothing if but dreamers, and so we have
Speaker 1: seen dreams turn into action, and that is where we
Speaker 1: should be putting our focus and our energies. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining Woke. If appreciate you, I appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Stay safe as always, dear friends. Power to the people
Speaker 1: and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay
Speaker 1: woke as fuck. See after Labor Day.