Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff the only podcast that I am currently recording
Speaker 1: while sleep deprived because I fell into a really deep
Speaker 1: research hall instead of sleeping. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 1: and with me today is Joel Monique, who is a
Speaker 1: filmmaker and iHeart, executive producer and a writer. How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm so good, Margaret. You know, sometimes we listen to
Speaker 2: be very frank and not too excited. I don't like
Speaker 2: when people are too happy. It makes me feel suspected,
Speaker 2: like what's going on that you have so much joy
Speaker 2: in your life?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like hippies, they're always pretending to be.
Speaker 2: Happy for sure. What was it? Called it toxic happiness
Speaker 2: with an aggressive happiness for You're like, this is it's
Speaker 2: too much. But I've been doing a lot of different
Speaker 2: stuff and trying new things and things. I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna do this for a really long time. For example,
Speaker 2: go on a vacation. I keep saying I'm going to
Speaker 2: go on vacation, and then either I work through it
Speaker 2: or it's a work trip, neither of which counts as
Speaker 2: a vacation. So I've actually told people you can't contact
Speaker 2: me through these days. I'm taking off, I have plans,
Speaker 2: I've booked things. It's happening. I am leaving my state.
Speaker 2: I'm only going to the next one, but it's still happening.
Speaker 2: I'm very excited about it. And I'm gonna see making
Speaker 2: the Stallion while I'm there, so you know, it's just
Speaker 2: a sea of winds.
Speaker 1: There's this HP Lovecraft movie that's terrible. I'lled dig on
Speaker 1: and I don't actually sually watch horror movies, but I
Speaker 1: watched this a long time ago. The scene that I remember,
Speaker 1: besides the scenes that I couldn't watch because I'm squeamish,
Speaker 1: was the very beginning. They're on this boat and he's
Speaker 1: just like working on his laptop the whole time they're
Speaker 1: on this like boat out off the coast of Spain
Speaker 1: or something, and finally his wife is like fuck you
Speaker 1: and throws his laptop into the ocean. And I think
Speaker 1: about that scene because about once a month I think
Speaker 1: to myself, what if I threw my laptop into the ocean,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be great? And then I remember how much
Speaker 1: I enjoy eating food and how much I enjoy expressing
Speaker 1: ideas and having other people interact with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you'd be upset without the word. I just think,
Speaker 2: what if I could work and it didn't have to
Speaker 2: be a grind?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What if you could work and people were like, that's
Speaker 2: good enough for today, and you're like, I also feel
Speaker 2: satisfied with the amount of work done today out of
Speaker 2: return for more work tomorrow, Like I'm gonna be alive tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It's just weird to me that we're just like just
Speaker 2: keep going, like, but I'm done, I'm done, I'm done
Speaker 2: for the day. I'm tired. Yeah, I feel you also
Speaker 2: would completely just be Sometimes I'm like, I do I
Speaker 2: need this laptop? So I throw it away? Do I
Speaker 2: violently destroy it?
Speaker 1: Or just put it in a.
Speaker 2: Drawer and close it and pretend like it's not there anymore?
Speaker 1: All the different ways we dream about destroying our phones
Speaker 1: and laptops.
Speaker 2: For sure.
Speaker 1: Well, you may be a producer, but you're not our producer,
Speaker 1: because our producer is Sophie. Hi.
Speaker 2: Hi, that's a good that's not Sophie.
Speaker 1: See, that's that's that's the joke is because actually we
Speaker 1: have another producer who's just usually not on Mike, named Scharen,
Speaker 1: but today Charene is our producer.
Speaker 3: Here, no, h charene, I am here. Thank you for
Speaker 3: having me.
Speaker 2: I'm always looking for opportunities to hang with Scheren And
Speaker 2: then you were like, Sharen can come hang out with us,
Speaker 2: and I was like, this is the greatest day.
Speaker 3: Way about you though, Oh my god, it was so
Speaker 3: cool at the moment.
Speaker 2: Correct very loved this is great.
Speaker 1: So okay, other people involved in making this. Our audio
Speaker 1: engineer is Danel. Everyone has to say hi to Daniel
Speaker 1: Hi Danel.
Speaker 3: Hy Danel Hi Danel.
Speaker 1: We love Our theme music was written forced by un woman.
Speaker 1: So the last time we had you on, I think
Speaker 1: was an episode about the Black Panthers Breakfast program, the
Speaker 1: Mutual Aid program.
Speaker 2: Yes, do you know what they're Okay? I asked my father.
Speaker 2: I was like, hey, will you tell me about that
Speaker 2: time that you got food from the Black Panthers And
Speaker 2: he was like, absolutely I would, And then I never
Speaker 2: thought about it again. I need to sit him down
Speaker 2: and actually get recorded, because yeah, he's got like all
Speaker 2: of these different stories and stuff. I can maybe ask
Speaker 2: my uncle too. But that was a great episode. I
Speaker 2: really like learning about that program. That program actually led
Speaker 2: me to the documentary The Dear Mama Tupac documentary have
Speaker 2: you seen and.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it yet. I want to do a
Speaker 1: specific I like have a book about the Shakur family specifically.
Speaker 1: And I'm like waiting to yes, yes, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's fabulous and one of the and I've watched a
Speaker 2: ton of dots about like the Black Panthers and stuff,
Speaker 2: but one of the best about the women behind the
Speaker 2: Black Panther movement, about the actual organization that went into
Speaker 2: the breakfast program and how it was useful, why it
Speaker 2: pissed people off. Fabulous, so good, great footage.
Speaker 1: That's that's awesome. And and the thing I love about
Speaker 1: that story. The thing that really stuck with me when
Speaker 1: people tell me this story when I was like a
Speaker 1: young radical or whatever, people be like, look, the black
Speaker 1: they're scared people because they walked around with guns, but
Speaker 1: they scared people especially because they fed people, you know.
Speaker 1: And this idea that the mutual aid program is like,
Speaker 1: really what scared the FBI? And we talked about that
Speaker 1: third episode, and today we're going to talk about even
Speaker 1: more mutual aid that scared the ever loving shit out
Speaker 1: of a bunch of racists. Oh okay, And the reason
Speaker 1: I am sleep deprived is this wasn't originally my plan
Speaker 1: when I set out to write a script this week,
Speaker 1: because last week on this show, I covered a bunch
Speaker 1: of factory takeovers in Argentina about how workers took over
Speaker 1: their workplaces and turned them into worker cooperatives in two
Speaker 1: thousand and one to two thousand and three or so,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of these are still around, and it
Speaker 1: was fun and had me on this like worker co
Speaker 1: op kick, and I was like, I might talk about
Speaker 1: worker co ops more this week. And in that episode
Speaker 1: last week, I made the claim that the history of
Speaker 1: the cooperative movement in the US owes an awful lot
Speaker 1: to Black America in a way that is not acknowledged
Speaker 1: much right, partly because like the overall okay, the reputation
Speaker 1: of co ops. When I think about like co ops,
Speaker 1: I tend to think of gentrifying forces of white people.
Speaker 2: Yes, sure, I also view that they are large, beautiful
Speaker 2: grocery stories with great produce where they stop you right
Speaker 2: at the front. They're like, do you have a membership?
Speaker 2: And if not, do you have cash for that membership?
Speaker 2: Otherwise get out and you're just like, oh, okay, won't
Speaker 2: even look at your space.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Yeah, and so I was like, Okay, I want
Speaker 1: to if I made that claim flippantly, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about it. And so I was like, Okay, when
Speaker 1: I do this piece on worker cooperatives, I'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about how I was influenced by the black cooperative,
Speaker 1: by black cooperative economic thought. And then I started reading
Speaker 1: all the books about black economic cooperative thought.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: So black cooperative economics is not the side story to
Speaker 1: this week. It is the story.
Speaker 2: It is the story as it should be. Probably we're
Speaker 2: about yes, it really is.
Speaker 1: Not only that, but like there's more Like I stopped
Speaker 1: because I ran out of like one time in the
Speaker 1: week because I'm sleep deprived, but two like it ran
Speaker 1: out of episode time. You know, Wow, we're not even
Speaker 1: going to run up to the modern day. The history
Speaker 1: of early Black American cooperative economics is just too good
Speaker 1: not to deep dive. It is even more fundamental to
Speaker 1: understanding how kind of everything in America works than I
Speaker 1: would have imagined. And the origin the origin to that
Speaker 1: is basically black mutual aid and black rebellion and black cooperation.
Speaker 1: Because as far as I can tell, every honest story
Speaker 1: about America starts in one or both of the following
Speaker 1: two places. Okay, either violent colonial expansion in the genocide
Speaker 1: of indigenous peoples, sure, yeah, or the unique racialized chattel
Speaker 1: slavery system that was the backbone of the New World
Speaker 1: and especially the US is a.
Speaker 2: Seem like important pillais to get started and building a
Speaker 2: class of people who leave everyone else literally in their dust. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I could see it. I could see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they would come.
Speaker 2: Back to this.
Speaker 1: It really does. Like any anything you talk about is
Speaker 1: that happens in the US is going to be influenced
Speaker 1: by both of these things. We all live in the
Speaker 1: shadow of these things. And I'm going to argue, because
Speaker 1: I like metaphor and take metaphor very seriously, that we
Speaker 1: live on land that is haunted. For some of us,
Speaker 1: it is haunted by what our ancestors did. For others,
Speaker 1: is haunted by what happened to our ancestors. For an
Speaker 1: awful lot of people, it's both. But this show's middle
Speaker 1: name is formally and Charine. Just make sure to make
Speaker 1: it from now on, the show's formal name just stick
Speaker 1: this in the middle of the show title is the
Speaker 1: coolest things that have ever happened have happened in the
Speaker 1: shadow of or in reaction to the worst atrocities the
Speaker 1: world's ever seen.
Speaker 3: Wait what we're ting? Can they get that down?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, the coolest things that have ever happened have
Speaker 1: happened in the shadow of, or in reaction to, the
Speaker 1: worst atrocities that the world's ever seen. It's a mouthful,
Speaker 1: but I think it's worth it.
Speaker 2: But accurate. Okay, I'm gonna listen more, and then I
Speaker 2: have potentially some theories.
Speaker 1: Wow, no, no, give me your theories.
Speaker 2: Okay, So before we started recording, I woulday, but I've
Speaker 2: been reading a ton of fantasy books, a lot a
Speaker 2: lot of fantasy that and Japanese death poetry heavily in
Speaker 2: my rotation lately, and the idea of atrocities being not
Speaker 2: necessary but entirely unavoidable. Yeah, right, has been lingering over
Speaker 2: a lot of that work. I think a lot of
Speaker 2: the fantasy I'm reading lately almost always has some kind
Speaker 2: of centered shenocide, wore atomic bomb, more atomic esque weapon,
Speaker 2: the big one. It's I think haunting us. I think
Speaker 2: we're very conscious, like subconsciously aware of the fact that
Speaker 2: we are constantly dealing with these atrocities, and yet it's
Speaker 2: weird how in our daytime. We do not at all
Speaker 2: make space to pause and think or react or address
Speaker 2: any of the issues. Yeah, totally sort of haunted by
Speaker 2: the fact that it's coming at me and like it's
Speaker 2: just pouring out of our art. It's just constantly pouring
Speaker 2: out of art of being like, do you know that
Speaker 2: we were just killing each other out like a very
Speaker 2: large level, very quickly. Yeah, do you see it is?
Speaker 2: It's not registering. It's pretty people are telling you. Does
Speaker 2: it register now? Maybe it's packaged in a very entertaining story.
Speaker 2: Do you see it now? No, it's been it's.
Speaker 1: Creeping me out a little bit.
Speaker 2: I'll be honest.
Speaker 1: No, But see that makes sense and it actually ties
Speaker 1: into something that I like. Folks will be surprised to
Speaker 1: know that. Another Cool Zone media host, Robert Evans, keeps
Speaker 1: the opposite schedule that I do, and so when I
Speaker 1: was awake at five in the morning to keep writing
Speaker 1: a script, Robert Evans was also awake, but for the
Speaker 1: opposite reason, and we were like texting each other and
Speaker 1: one of the things that comes up is about we
Speaker 1: were just talking about how emotion comes through art and
Speaker 1: sometimes how we kind of need art both the creation
Speaker 1: of it and the experience of it almost to like
Speaker 1: let ourselves feel certain emotions. Yeah, you know, and it
Speaker 1: I don't know whether it's because like otherwise we're afraid
Speaker 1: that we'll be consumed by them or let mean, honestly, okay,
Speaker 1: this is completely off the capital we're talking about, but
Speaker 1: like I feel, as I get older, i'd like have
Speaker 1: my emotional reactions are dulled. They're still there, but they're
Speaker 1: like the sharp edges have been like worn down by time.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure, So art becomes even more important to
Speaker 1: me as they get older.
Speaker 2: Is that why dads can only cry when they watch movies,
Speaker 2: watch very emotional movies, because they're like because I talked
Speaker 2: to my father and father like figures men of fatherly ages.
Speaker 2: And a lot of times, you know, when I talk
Speaker 2: about taking action, they are so like you could if
Speaker 2: you want to do if they're like, it's really honorable
Speaker 2: that you want to be organizing her out in the street.
Speaker 2: But that's not a thing that works. I've said it
Speaker 2: fail so many times. It's just it's almost cute, you know,
Speaker 2: because it's sometimes cantatizing where you're like celeeral, but yeah,
Speaker 2: they're just they're complete. Do I think worn down by existing.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, are is important. I'm excited to learn about commerce.
Speaker 2: Don't mean to derailis. But no, no, I really got
Speaker 2: me thinking. And I've also been reading so much poetry
Speaker 2: lately that I was immediately like LinkedIn. I was like, yes,
Speaker 2: I too, take poetry seriously.
Speaker 1: No, no, I I this is the other stuff that
Speaker 1: I'm like. I think people they only know me through
Speaker 1: my podcast are like, ah, Margaret who only reads history books,
Speaker 1: which is true because I spend all my time reading
Speaker 1: history books. But like art and all this stuff, is
Speaker 1: I like anything to talk about it too, but to
Speaker 1: talk about history and sociology books. I've talked a lot
Speaker 1: on the show about the nineteenth century labor movement, especially
Speaker 1: how either how annoying and racist the white unions were
Speaker 1: or how cool the internationalist, anti racist like integrated unions were.
Speaker 1: I haven't actually talked yet as much as I'd like
Speaker 1: to about the specific black unions that also existed. But
Speaker 1: all the good stuff that comes from the crucible of
Speaker 1: the labor movement came either through immigrant workers or black workers.
Speaker 1: And we've talked a bunch about a bunch of different strikes,
Speaker 1: about how the most important strike in US history. The
Speaker 1: most successful labor action in all of US history was
Speaker 1: when the black people in the South won the Civil
Speaker 1: War by conducting the largest general strike in US history,
Speaker 1: crippling the Confederate economy.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, you think about what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: Oh god, no, no, no, okay, so, oh my god.
Speaker 1: So there's this sociologist who I'm about to talk about,
Speaker 1: a bunch named W. E. B. Dubois and not yeah,
Speaker 1: not pronounced Dubois, Dubois, which I kept wanting to say constantly,
Speaker 1: but it's Dubois. And he wrote this theory. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't a theory he like, I mean, he backed it
Speaker 1: up with facts. I guess it's like a theory in
Speaker 1: like a science way, not in a like random conjecture way.
Speaker 1: Right where he lays out that enslaved people in the
Speaker 1: US South performed a massive general strike. They withheld their
Speaker 1: labor during the Civil War in a way that crippled
Speaker 1: the Confederate economy and in many ways won the war
Speaker 1: and the transfer also because a ton of people fled
Speaker 1: at great risk to get across the lines and then
Speaker 1: they didn't just like I mean, I'm sure some of
Speaker 1: them did. I wouldn't blame him, but they didn't just
Speaker 1: like keep going. They stuck around, and they said, well,
Speaker 1: how can we help, how can we help the war effort?
Speaker 1: And there was this like labor army of formally enslaved,
Speaker 1: self emancipated people and it actually, like I talked about
Speaker 1: it long enough ago that I'm afraid I'll get the
Speaker 1: details wrong. Okay, but this is what I knew about
Speaker 1: du boys is that he was the guy who wrote
Speaker 1: that thing about the general strike and like changed my
Speaker 1: conception of the US Civil War. But it turns out
Speaker 1: he wrote a lot of stuff. I mean, I knew
Speaker 1: he wrote a lot of stuff, right, Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: know what it was. So du Bois spent his incredibly
Speaker 1: long and influential career throwing proverbial dynamond I guess. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: like part of the reason I think that we don't
Speaker 1: hear about him much, right is because by the time,
Speaker 1: at least of like my white education, there is only
Speaker 1: two black people in history, and there's the good one,
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King and then the bad one Malcolm X.
Speaker 2: For sure. The way uh it was, I went to
Speaker 2: an all white elementary school, and so yeah, that was
Speaker 2: definitely the the messaging across the board there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so we didn't hear about him as much
Speaker 1: or any of the like really influential thinkers that came
Speaker 1: before the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Wait was to be Okay, did Paris had a World's
Speaker 2: Fair at some point? I think he was at.
Speaker 1: It and he didn't put it past him. It would
Speaker 1: that sounds like something he would do.
Speaker 2: Okay, if it's this incredible book that is so highlights
Speaker 2: all this detailed information that he brought there about like
Speaker 2: what the African American was doing like at that time,
Speaker 2: and there's like all these beautiful photographs, so folks like
Speaker 2: dressed to the nines, and then there's like talk of
Speaker 2: their business and stuff, and just that heat had sort
Speaker 2: of like was recording and preserving our history as it
Speaker 2: was happening in a way that wouldn't be bias leader,
Speaker 2: which I think is kind.
Speaker 1: Of that sounds like this guy, yeah, because that's what
Speaker 1: he He's a sociologist and he was really fucking good one.
Speaker 1: And another thing that he talked about a lot that
Speaker 1: we take for granted today, but was a revolutionary idea
Speaker 1: at the time. Even my white education talked about how
Speaker 1: the failure of reconstruction right like after the Civil War
Speaker 1: was one how the failure of it was because of
Speaker 1: racist white people, right, it was because of Jim Crow
Speaker 1: Laws and the KKK and like not like black people
Speaker 1: are lazy until the boys proved it. The general hypothesis
Speaker 1: with black people are lazy and that's why reconstruction failed,
Speaker 1: which makes me very annoyed.
Speaker 2: This is Tony Morrison has a quote I will pair
Speaker 2: of phrase about sort of being for still waste time
Speaker 2: explaining racism away to be like, hey, that's just racism, Yeah,
Speaker 2: not talking in fact, you're just talking to me racism
Speaker 2: and how to take my time to explain why it's
Speaker 2: racist to you instead of doing the work that I
Speaker 2: should actually be doing. One exhausting situation. Our poor guy
Speaker 2: to bois, he was really suffering.
Speaker 1: That's what he did over the course of his Like
Speaker 1: this guy lives to be ninety five and he keeps
Speaker 1: working his entire life, right, he saw a lot, sir,
Speaker 1: And like I think about I don't remember this guy's name.
Speaker 1: A long time ago, my ex boyfriend was telling me
Speaker 1: this story about like, yeah, there was this scientist and
Speaker 1: he had to spend his entire career measuring skulls because
Speaker 1: he was the guy who proved that black people's brains
Speaker 1: aren't smaller, and like, imagine, I mean, I guess that's
Speaker 1: an important thing to do with your life. Imagine having
Speaker 1: to do that with your fucking life.
Speaker 2: I have to put so many numbers down on paper
Speaker 2: that you finally see was just right in front of
Speaker 2: your face, that that's it's trying, it's trying existing in space. Sometimes, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's crazy.
Speaker 1: So Dubois said a lot of stuff, some of which
Speaker 1: was mind blowing at the time, it seems obvious in retrospect,
Speaker 1: and some of which isn't talked about now, like this
Speaker 1: general strike theory of the US Civil War, and people
Speaker 1: have pushed back on that a little bit, like it
Speaker 1: wasn't the only thing that once the Civil War. There
Speaker 1: was this whole war part of it too, you know,
Speaker 1: and like, but it was a really important part that
Speaker 1: is still left out of that conversation. He was also
Speaker 1: the first person writing about black cooperative economics, at least
Speaker 1: that I've found, and in nineteen oh seven he edited
Speaker 1: a book called Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, which had
Speaker 1: an excellent and evocative subtitle report of a social study
Speaker 1: made by Atlanta University under the patronage of Carnegie Institution
Speaker 1: of Washington, d C. Together with the proceedings of the
Speaker 1: twelfth Conference of the Study of the Negro Problems held
Speaker 1: at Lanta University on Tuesday, May the twenty eighth. Nineteen
Speaker 1: oh seven. Wow, I know, just really draws you in.
Speaker 2: Rules, right out the tongue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. Two epiphanies while reading this one. People knew
Speaker 1: how to subtitle books back in the day. Just really
Speaker 1: just lays it out, just real explicit.
Speaker 2: No talk about what's in here. We're not trying to
Speaker 2: build mystery. This is the text, Please find us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Two. My second epiphany was that I have become
Speaker 1: someone who reads books with subtitles like this and finds
Speaker 1: them riveting and loses sleep because I read more of
Speaker 1: the nineteen oh seven book that's incredibly hard to parse
Speaker 1: than the twenty fourteen book that explains it all very
Speaker 1: rationally and in a way that's easier to understand.
Speaker 2: Because you're an academic and you're like, this is the
Speaker 2: first source, this is this is the good stuff right here.
Speaker 2: I never knew anyone else's opinions or thoughts.
Speaker 1: No, I'm in art schools, I can't be an academic.
Speaker 1: And then I'm like, no, I participate in the academic
Speaker 1: study of these books. And yeah, exactly. The nineteen oh
Speaker 1: seven book has a lot more of the like really
Speaker 1: interesting details, and a lot less of the here's how
Speaker 1: to explain it to someone one hundred and fifteen years
Speaker 1: from now.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The more readable book I just want to shout out
Speaker 1: is called Collective Courage. It's by Jessica Gordon Nemhard and
Speaker 1: it's from one hundred years later, in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: That's the one I'll be reading.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but before we talk about the history itself, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about these products and services that supported
Speaker 1: our podcast and we're back. Hey, I also want to
Speaker 1: talk about the historian. I want to talk about W. E. B.
Speaker 1: Du Bois, or as his friends called him, because he
Speaker 1: insisted doctor du Bois.
Speaker 2: List. See, he said, I have the education. I'm not
Speaker 2: dealing with these white people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, totally, Like.
Speaker 2: This is exhausting, y'all see me, you know what's up?
Speaker 2: Please call me the proper way. I respect the hell
Speaker 2: out of it.
Speaker 1: Even his best friend had to call him doctor du Bois. However,
Speaker 1: his best friend was white. So it's like, according to
Speaker 1: one article I read.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is so he said, I can't be best
Speaker 2: friends with you if you show me proper respect and
Speaker 2: deference at all times so I'm not caught out tripping again.
Speaker 2: Seems reasonable that a pro like, we're gonna risk friendship
Speaker 2: in this era.
Speaker 1: And if you're gonna be a guy who's like even
Speaker 1: my best friends to call me doctor du bois, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna be five foot five and carry a cane
Speaker 1: even when you don't need it, and wear like dressed
Speaker 1: to the nines at all times, you are either an
Speaker 1: asshole or one of the coolest and weirdest, most interesting
Speaker 1: intellectuals of your time.
Speaker 2: It's really a fifty to fifty split here because I'm
Speaker 2: keeping read flags. But also, like, you know what, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the truth is always a little murkier. You really want
Speaker 2: to put him in a category. I'm sure he was
Speaker 2: a complicated human being. Yeah, but there's definitely a lot
Speaker 2: of those areaser just like we what now. But yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, okay, guy had personality you would not soon
Speaker 2: forget him.
Speaker 1: No, I find him charming. I haven't read as much
Speaker 1: about his personal life, you know, is that some people
Speaker 1: have pointed out that he wasn't necessarily the best husband
Speaker 1: or father, but that is outside the scope of this podcast,
Speaker 1: and I don't know enough to really talk about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but besides all these things, the thing you need to
Speaker 1: know about doctor du Boys is that he was the
Speaker 1: first black graduate with a PhD from Harvard. He had
Speaker 1: the club.
Speaker 2: I assure you the pleasure was Harvard when somebody was
Speaker 2: asking him about what was her time at Harvard, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm sure the pleasure was Harvard. I'm a fact that,
Speaker 2: but I'm pretty sure that's that care that rules.
Speaker 1: Okay, which is awesome because later in his life he's
Speaker 1: going to reference Oscar Wilde, and Oscar Wilde was exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of guy who would say that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: right for sure, Like I've I found at least one
Speaker 1: thing that referred to him as a dandy, and I
Speaker 1: really like putting him in the Oscar wild category. In
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, spiffy fits wellgroom mushed ash, you can
Speaker 2: see it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like real fucking good takes on politics.
Speaker 2: Actually, yes, Harvard, Goozett confirms, Okay, that's a factual quote
Speaker 2: from Hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the second thing you need to know about
Speaker 1: doctor Dubois is that he was born in eighteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: which is famously only three years after the first Juneteenth,
Speaker 1: the day when the amani Emancipation Proclamation finally hit Texas.
Speaker 2: Okay, not to safie too much, but I recently found
Speaker 2: out my great great great possibly a fourth grade in there.
Speaker 2: Grandfather at the initial one in Austin. We own a
Speaker 2: store called the Lions Convenience Store, part of the founding,
Speaker 2: like Black families of Austin. I was very excited about it.
Speaker 2: I no idea where the first two teenth That's amazing.
Speaker 2: I've been learning a lot about this space and time.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting period for black people that I think
Speaker 2: we're sort of only just now uncovering as a consciously
Speaker 2: like the in a more zeitgeist way.
Speaker 1: That makes sense to me. I think that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like it's been really interesting to me to
Speaker 1: learn that we know more about things that happened a
Speaker 1: long time ago now than we did like closer to
Speaker 1: those events.
Speaker 2: Yes, one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: That is wild to me. So he was born only
Speaker 1: three years after the end of legal chattel slavery in
Speaker 1: the US and I'm adding all those qualifiers because there
Speaker 1: is still legal slavery in the US. It is in
Speaker 1: prison systems, and there's still chattel slavery in the US.
Speaker 1: It happens to undocumented people. But the end of legal
Speaker 1: chattel slavery in the US is a big fucking deal,
Speaker 1: one of the biggest deals in the history of the world. Honestly,
Speaker 1: he lived for ninety five years and he died in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three. He literally died the day before the
Speaker 1: March on Washington from the nineteen sixties civil rights era.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait to mark history with just your entrance and exits.
Speaker 1: A it's a reminder that the space between these two
Speaker 1: events is one guy. There's one guy between those events.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow, he wasn't there for either of them, Right,
Speaker 2: you just missed. Yeah, that's intense. Yeah. Time is much
Speaker 2: shorter than we think it is. Sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Dubois before he was doctor du Bois, when
Speaker 1: he was just Web, he probably didn't go by w
Speaker 1: He probably did. He's the kind of kid who would
Speaker 1: have gone by Web. Someone knows more about this than me.
Speaker 1: There's hundreds of books written about this man. I read
Speaker 1: some of his writing and some writing about him. He
Speaker 1: was born in Massachusetts in a black community that he
Speaker 1: described as a fairly idyllic setting, like local white churches
Speaker 1: helped pay for his college, and he says he didn't
Speaker 1: experience a ton of racism as a kid. Then he
Speaker 1: went to an HBCU, a historically black college in Tennessee.
Speaker 1: That place is called Fisk. You will be surprised to
Speaker 1: know that between his idyllic black community in Massachusetts and
Speaker 1: Tennessee in whatever, he suddenly had to experience an awful
Speaker 1: lot of racism culture shock.
Speaker 2: When you cast the Mason Dixon HiT's different for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He went on to become the first black person
Speaker 1: in history to get PhD from Harvard, like I was saying,
Speaker 1: and then he just went on to write some of
Speaker 1: the most influential shit about race the world has ever seen.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh three, he published his most famous book,
Speaker 1: The Souls of Black Folk. By nineteen thirty five, he
Speaker 1: wrote Black Reconstruction, which is when he laid out about
Speaker 1: how Reconstruction was a failure of wasn't a failure by
Speaker 1: black people?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the classic black civil rights dichotomy that I
Speaker 1: grew up learning about, of course, is Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: the Reformer, and Malcolm X the radical right. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: sells MLKA short. He was way fucking cooler than my
Speaker 1: white liberal education taught me.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure. For sure. I think when I'm okay,
Speaker 2: it's like the one of the most waking organizers, like
Speaker 2: guy on the ground who understood what it meant not
Speaker 2: just to be the face, but to structure the the
Speaker 2: way movements were captured. Right, like when I just recently
Speaker 2: learned that he chose pretty women to be arrested with
Speaker 2: and Georgia, who was like, listen, if they're arresting gorgeous
Speaker 2: young women, people are gonna be upset about it.
Speaker 4: Me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, black, I don't really care about me. They'll care
Speaker 2: these women are geting arrested, and they could be like,
Speaker 2: show we're knowing. Also what we know about the man
Speaker 2: is a full human being. But I also think it's
Speaker 2: just like that kind of thinking is a is necessary
Speaker 2: in order to make movements h gain traction with folks
Speaker 2: who might otherwise just you know, chill in the middle,
Speaker 2: be comfortable and that. Yeah, yeah, a brilliant thinker, not
Speaker 2: just the guy who was like, we no fighting back,
Speaker 2: which I think is often how he gets painted.
Speaker 1: No, totally, and it's he's easier to misrepresent and recuperate
Speaker 1: into capitalism and like whiteness than the man than Malcolm X,
Speaker 1: who was just it's very hard to do that to
Speaker 1: Malcolm X.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, well, because you get to whatever you see
Speaker 2: Malcomax being Oh, that guy took no shit, like he
Speaker 2: would not food anybody in this room. He would be
Speaker 2: like pretender, fake, get out of my face, like no,
Speaker 2: there's no uh, it's not a guy who was interested
Speaker 2: in being a politician necessarily.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and clear. I wouldn't fuck with either of them
Speaker 1: by selling them on the street.
Speaker 2: I'm okay, we'll just take you by surprise exactly, sweet
Speaker 2: face like pastorly voice where you're like, oh okay, like
Speaker 2: this guy's chill, and then he starts speaking to you
Speaker 2: like I'm dumb, I'm stupid, and why did I think
Speaker 2: I could take this man is brilliant, Like oh.
Speaker 1: God, yeah, no, totally. So at the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: you had a different dichotomy of black intellectuals that was
Speaker 1: being presented to everyone. Right, you had Booker T. Washington,
Speaker 1: who is more moderate. His position gets called accommodationism and
Speaker 1: basically Booker T. Washington, this sells him a little bit short,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk about in a second. Booker T. Washington
Speaker 1: said folks should compromise on their rights in order to
Speaker 1: get the bare minimum ount of white society. Basically, doctor
Speaker 1: du Bois comes on the scene and he's like, we
Speaker 1: are intellectually the equal of whites, and we demand a
Speaker 1: quality now. But it's not just like du Bois radical,
Speaker 1: Washington boring compromiser. It was actually about also how they
Speaker 1: positions themselves are on class. Washington was like, we want
Speaker 1: to focus on our working class power. I'm paraphrasing here,
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit putting words in their mouths. We're
Speaker 1: going to focus on working class power by educating ourselves
Speaker 1: as laborers and will become the economic equals of white
Speaker 1: people by like doing manual labor and stuff, and then
Speaker 1: we'll be in a better place to fight for our rights.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people don't like this because it's like, well,
Speaker 1: that's the work we're already expected to do within white society. Anyway,
Speaker 1: du Bois came in and he believed in what was
Speaker 1: called a classical education. He's a Harvard man. He wants
Speaker 1: to focus on intellectual quality. He claimed that a quote
Speaker 1: talented tenth, a sort of intellectual class of elites that
Speaker 1: made up about ten percent of the black population, aha,
Speaker 1: would lead the black people to equality. And it is
Speaker 1: not surprising that he ends up pretty Marxist, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the talented tenth is the belief there within
Speaker 2: is still held strongly amongst certain African Americans, and in
Speaker 2: concerning in what I find to be somewhat concerning ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and du bois So the boys didn't coin it. It
Speaker 1: was actually coined by a white northern liberals who used
Speaker 1: it to diswade their plans.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, They were like, oh, we're going to establish black
Speaker 1: colleges in the South and make a make a talented tenth.
Speaker 1: You could probably guess by the way in our tones.
Speaker 1: I have no interest in offering strategic advice. This is
Speaker 1: not a plan that specifically appeals to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think any plaster, any plan for improvement that
Speaker 2: requires selecting tempercent of people to move on while everybody
Speaker 2: else sort of waits for them to open the door,
Speaker 2: is immediately suspect, like, wait, what's happening here? Who's doing
Speaker 2: the choosing? Would define talent? Talent in what way like
Speaker 2: it just it's all it's yeah, not great.
Speaker 1: Well what's interesting. Du Bois is such an interesting thinker.
Speaker 1: He develops as he gets older and I'm cutting ahead
Speaker 1: to further my script, he changes his position this and
Speaker 1: he stops being like by the end of his life,
Speaker 1: he's not like, oh, we need the smart ten percent.
Speaker 1: He kind of is like, we need the moral ten percent. Oh,
Speaker 1: and we also need people to like integrate our struggle
Speaker 1: into broader struggle of other marginalized people, and like there's
Speaker 1: actually he's hard to pin down in some ways.
Speaker 2: We change so much over the course of our extremely
Speaker 2: long lives.
Speaker 1: I know, right, like what like I don't think the
Speaker 1: same shit when I was twenty No.
Speaker 2: Thank god he experienced so much.
Speaker 1: So this more radical thinker actually still had more in
Speaker 1: common with MLK than Malcolm X, at least tactically. Du
Speaker 1: Bois in the early twentieth century. He was not super
Speaker 1: stoked on Black Insurrection. He was like, I get it,
Speaker 1: I'm not anti. I understand why people do it. Like
Speaker 1: he's not mad at Nat Turner, for example, like the
Speaker 1: most famous slaver vault person during this period. And we'll
Speaker 1: probably still you know, all that stuff comes from the
Speaker 1: right place and maintains our dignity. Right, It's better than
Speaker 1: just sucking it up. But it is politically misguided because
Speaker 1: with the white power structure is more powerful than us,
Speaker 1: is his argument. But the opposite position, the accommodationist position,
Speaker 1: destroys our dignity and undermines us as people. He presents
Speaker 1: this idea so he believes in this third tradition, a
Speaker 1: nonviolent defiance, which he connects to Frederick Douglas's legacy. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this from my point of view, all
Speaker 1: of these people are so you know, like when you
Speaker 1: simplify him to be like oh Berker T. Washington's like
Speaker 1: boring liberal, yeah, or like Frederick Douglass totally nonviolent. Like
Speaker 1: first of all, I mean, like the Civil War wasn't
Speaker 1: a non violent protest. His like sons were fighting in that.
Speaker 1: You know, he was a little bit old by that point.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he would have been. Frederick Douglass was no pacifist.
Speaker 1: I like this quote by him because it, well, whatever
Speaker 1: he says, if the Southern outrages on the colored race continue,
Speaker 1: the negro will become a chemist. Anarchists have not the opoly.
Speaker 1: I'm bomb making and the Negro will learn.
Speaker 2: A check and innate. Just don't push us too far.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate with people just kind of laying on
Speaker 2: the line just to be like, you know, what actually
Speaker 2: we do, But I think that's also it's irritating. And
Speaker 2: again I would say with my my education in Black
Speaker 2: American history begins in college because I was want to
Speaker 2: start hanging out more black kids my age, and I
Speaker 2: I'm sort of it's somewhat perplexing, but also you understand
Speaker 2: the intentionality of it the older I get of just
Speaker 2: how things we think are understood and buried are constantly
Speaker 2: rebrought up as being like factual, like the idea that oh,
Speaker 2: black folks just lack education, and if it's just education,
Speaker 2: then that would be what would give them a head,
Speaker 2: or oh they're lazy, if they would just work harder,
Speaker 2: then that's how. It's just like, it's wild to me
Speaker 2: that people can still be distracted from the fact that
Speaker 2: these are systems in place that are concrete and and
Speaker 2: and they're here, and we have to fix it. We
Speaker 2: have to do I mean, we have to tear down
Speaker 2: and rebuild the system. But there's that I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's just crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: No, And you know you're right about how like, yeah,
Speaker 1: watching these things, like of course everyone understands systemic racism,
Speaker 1: and then we've like slipped at remembering systemic racism, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Dubois was into a sort of less violent defiance.
Speaker 1: To quote author David Haikwan Kim, Dubois's third way of
Speaker 1: political self assertion quote inherits the moral and spiritual legacy
Speaker 1: of black insurrectionism without advocating violent mayhem or caste submission.
Speaker 1: And so basically it's like, well, we're going to stand up,
Speaker 1: but we're just not necessarily going to do it in
Speaker 1: these like kind of one off ways. But he gets
Speaker 1: really interesting but all this shit I okay, well so
Speaker 1: hear me out, Okay, okay, So tactically and strategically he's
Speaker 1: sounding a little bit more Martin Luther King. Right, non
Speaker 1: violence is not the same as submission. It's the op
Speaker 1: is a form of rebellion.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But the other thing about du Bois is that he
Speaker 1: also presaged black nationalism in some ways, according to at
Speaker 1: least you know, some of the authors I was reading.
Speaker 1: Frederick Douglass was about black folks integrating into white society.
Speaker 1: The boys insisted that black people should embrace their African
Speaker 1: heritage even while living in the US.
Speaker 2: Yes, everyone else is allowed to, might we also enjoy?
Speaker 1: And he gets more radical as he gets older. Later
Speaker 1: in his life he talked about how this negative view
Speaker 1: he had of the insurrectionist like when he was writing
Speaker 1: in his youth, he wrote about black insurrectionists being like, look,
Speaker 1: I got where they're coming from, but it wasn't the
Speaker 1: right plan. And the white insurrectionists, like the labor movement
Speaker 1: and the anarchists and stuff like that, he writes about
Speaker 1: them and he's like, I don't know, it's just weird
Speaker 1: flash in the pan stuff. It doesn't matter. Right Later
Speaker 1: he writes explicitly about how this was his Harvard education,
Speaker 1: talking this is what they taught him to believe about
Speaker 1: these movements, and he started seeing labor uprisings as part
Speaker 1: of a lineage of struggle, not as just like sporadic
Speaker 1: uprisings into chaos.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: He started adding class more actively to his critique, and
Speaker 1: he started seeing all of these struggles as connected. And
Speaker 1: he didn't drop race. This is his primary thing for
Speaker 1: understandable reasons, but he became more of a like racism
Speaker 1: deeply informs capitalism, and the two are intertwined, which is
Speaker 1: to say, I really like this guy's thinking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and you've paid a picture of an evolution, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you grew up in a sheltered, comfortable
Speaker 2: town where everybody looks like you and your happy in
Speaker 2: life is good, like, that's how you perceive the whole
Speaker 2: world because you were young, know nothing else. And then
Speaker 2: you get to college and you learn a little bit more,
Speaker 2: and then it sounds like what should be obvious, And
Speaker 2: maybe the main lesson and takeaway for folks is I've
Speaker 2: start speaking to more organizers. Is something I've certainly been
Speaker 2: checked on a lot, which is like, you come from
Speaker 2: a class that has a lot of privilege that you've
Speaker 2: not acknowledged yet. And if you do not acknowledge your
Speaker 2: class privilege, and then if you do not engage people
Speaker 2: outside of your class, you are not actively doing the work.
Speaker 2: You're missing such a large picture of what's actually going on.
Speaker 2: And it just sounds like he got out in the
Speaker 2: world and was like, oh, there's a lot totally. The
Speaker 2: workers are angry for a reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not random, no, absolutely, but you know what's a
Speaker 1: good steam valve for class aggression is ads and stuff
Speaker 1: that goodbye, and that way you don't feel as bad
Speaker 1: about capitalism because you can participate in it through here's
Speaker 1: the ad break.
Speaker 2: Did do? Did it do?
Speaker 1: And we're back.
Speaker 2: Hey.
Speaker 1: So he actually helped form the NAACP in nineteen oh nine,
Speaker 1: and then he edited its paper for twenty five years,
Speaker 1: which was called The Crisis, which is a fucking sick
Speaker 1: name for a newspaper.
Speaker 2: It really is gets attention getting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm not going to get into like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of other folks, like Marcus Garvey comes on
Speaker 1: the scene shortly after this and is pretty critical of Dubois.
Speaker 1: They have a lot of conflict and you know, and
Speaker 1: they're both involved in the Pan Africanist movement, which is
Speaker 1: a movement to unite Africa and also often African people
Speaker 1: in the diaspora into one identity and or nation to
Speaker 1: unite against colonization. But like there's a lot of like
Speaker 1: splits within that, and like Dubois, understandably, people were critical
Speaker 1: of some of the things that he said. Into sure,
Speaker 1: but you know, whatever I did all this cool shit.
Speaker 1: His actual political beliefs were pretty consistent throughout his life,
Speaker 1: He started off even before he figured out all this
Speaker 1: other shit, believing in economic cooperation, like it's not even
Speaker 1: the it's not even like nineteen hundred yet before he
Speaker 1: starts writing about economic cooperation. He also believed consistently throughout
Speaker 1: his life that black people should demand their rights directly
Speaker 1: and immediately, and he was basically a democratic socialist for
Speaker 1: most of his career. How he actually carried himself politically varied. Basically,
Speaker 1: he did whatever he thought was pragmatic at any given point.
Speaker 1: He would sometimes vote Republican, sometimes Democrats, sometimes third party,
Speaker 1: sometimes refuse to vote, depending on the candidates at the time,
Speaker 1: and basically like what they specifically offered to the black community,
Speaker 1: which I don't make sense.
Speaker 2: Whatever, it's a logical way to vote and move through
Speaker 2: life to Yeah, no party loyalties, I'm aboutfit.
Speaker 1: He would join and leave the Socialist Party and the
Speaker 1: Communist Party. He would pick fights and men ties between
Speaker 1: the NAACP and the Communist Party, like all the time.
Speaker 1: He started off against US involvement in World War One.
Speaker 1: This is a common sort of anti imperialist position. Then
Speaker 1: he ended up in favor of World War One. Then
Speaker 1: he regretted being in favor of World War One. He
Speaker 1: was opposed to US involvement in World War Two, especially
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Theater, because he figured that the US
Speaker 1: would probably use that opportunity to just do more imperialism,
Speaker 1: which which yeah, you know, that makes sense. There's very
Speaker 1: few wars that the US is a government was involved
Speaker 1: with which I'm like, we were solidly on the right side,
Speaker 1: and World War two is one of those. But I
Speaker 1: still completely understand the critique of the Pacific theater. We'll
Speaker 1: just expand US interests.
Speaker 2: I mean, listen, you two things can be true. We
Speaker 2: could join Lee and fight Nazis and also ravage countries
Speaker 2: that were like, its completely unnecessary. We take advantage wherever
Speaker 2: we go, so you know, yeah, man, yeah.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: So compromising in ways that seemed pragmatic and then regretting
Speaker 1: it was a hallmark of his life, it seems. And
Speaker 1: I'm making that because it happened at least twice. Okay,
Speaker 1: there was the World War one one and then in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty eight, one of du Bois's mentees was a
Speaker 1: fellow black Harvard Man named Augustus Granville Dill, and he
Speaker 1: was caught by the vice squad doing homosexuality in a
Speaker 1: public bathroom. Du Boys fired him from the crisis Boys
Speaker 1: now and Augustus retired from writing, and then spent the
Speaker 1: rest of his life like as a piano player and teacher.
Speaker 1: Du Bois regretted this for the rest of his life,
Speaker 1: as you shared it in his autobiography, he wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I
Speaker 1: had never understood the tragedy of an Oscar Wild. I
Speaker 1: dismissed my coworker forthwith and spent heavy days regretting my act.
Speaker 2: Amazing of you two, say so, sir, I mean, I
Speaker 2: think a lot of people would just take it to
Speaker 2: their grave, you know. I know, it's wonderful for him
Speaker 2: to have said it out loud, because it is really tragic.
Speaker 1: That's the thing I find really compelling is this sort
Speaker 1: of intellectual honesty where it seems like he's like not
Speaker 1: specifically committed to an ideology, he's like committed to trying
Speaker 1: to do right, and sometimes he slips up really dramatically
Speaker 1: and is inconsistent, and he feels really human.
Speaker 2: I mean, and that's a rarity, I think, especially for
Speaker 2: people who are lifted onto such pedestals and the work
Speaker 2: is very good. People are like hero, I'm like well
Speaker 2: human being.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, totally. As he aged, he became more and
Speaker 1: more radical During the Cold War. He remained critical of
Speaker 1: the USSR for its despotism, but overall he backed them
Speaker 1: against US imperialism, and the US didn't like him for this.
Speaker 1: He's absolutely caught up in the Red scare time and
Speaker 1: time again, even though he kept like being like, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not with the communists, but he would like as
Speaker 1: the US government like goes after him more and more,
Speaker 1: He's just hanging out with his communist friends. He's like,
Speaker 1: fuck the US government.
Speaker 2: He's like, I'm not one of them, but I like
Speaker 2: it better over here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he deepened his analysis of how all sorts
Speaker 1: of marginalized people need to work together. He shifted his
Speaker 1: belief about an educated vanguard leading the way to a
Speaker 1: sort of moral guidance where being a good person and
Speaker 1: specifically selfless was far more important than specifically their education.
Speaker 1: The US revoked his passport for him being a commi,
Speaker 1: and when he was like in his fucking in his eighties,
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, no, you're a sketchy commi.
Speaker 2: Uncle Sam's never not petty.
Speaker 1: I know it took a nineteen fifty eight Supreme Court
Speaker 1: decision to get him his passport back.
Speaker 2: Y'all were extra petty. Wow. Usually this is running around
Speaker 2: with some paperwork, a little extra long line. Yeah, Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: God damn.
Speaker 1: So he moved to Ghana nineteen sixty one, at age
Speaker 1: ninety three.
Speaker 2: I love the man, he says, and peace out. No
Speaker 2: one talked to me ever again.
Speaker 1: Sucking done. Yeah, and before he moves to Ghana, as
Speaker 1: final fuck you to the US government, he formally enrolls
Speaker 1: and gets his membership card in the Communist Party the USA.
Speaker 1: Slow clap, slow, and most analysis I've seen isn't because
Speaker 1: like suddenly, at ninety three, he suddenly becomes a committed
Speaker 1: Communist Party communist.
Speaker 2: He's been doing it the whole time.
Speaker 1: It's a fuck you, it's a fuck you the Red Scare,
Speaker 1: it's a fuck you the US government.
Speaker 2: That is amazing. I really I enjoy that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you help this man prisoner. I mean, like, the United
Speaker 2: States is large, but there's the reason he should be
Speaker 2: confined to its borders. That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He died in Ghana two years later, not suspiciously. I
Speaker 1: mean he was fucking ninety five and he died the
Speaker 1: day before the march on Washington.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And the Communist Party in the US, honestly, being pretty clever,
Speaker 1: they started a youth organization called the du Boys Club,
Speaker 1: which was a reference to the patriotic boys clubs of America.
Speaker 2: That's amazing settiness all around. Live.
Speaker 3: You know that, I did laugh really hard, And.
Speaker 1: So yeah do boys one of America's most important public intellectuals.
Speaker 1: And why do I want to talk about him? I
Speaker 1: did all this research talking about him because because of
Speaker 1: a paragraph he wrote in the introduction of his book
Speaker 1: about economic cooperation, the nineteen oh seven book. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote this paragraph, quote the conference. The conference
Speaker 1: that produced this report regards the economic development of the
Speaker 1: Negro Americans at present as in a critical state. The
Speaker 1: crisis arises not so much because of the idleness or
Speaker 1: even a lack of skill, as by reason of the
Speaker 1: fact they unwittingly stand hesitating at the crossroads. One way
Speaker 1: leads to the old trodden ways of grasping fierce individualistic competition,
Speaker 1: where the shrewd, cunning, skilled and rich among them will
Speaker 1: prey upon the ignorance and simplicity of the mass of
Speaker 1: the race and get wealth at the expense of the
Speaker 1: general well being. The other way leading to cooperation and
Speaker 1: capital and labor, the massing of small savings, the wide
Speaker 1: distribution of capital, and a more general equality of wealth
Speaker 1: and comfort. The latter path of cooperative effort has already
Speaker 1: been entered by many. We find a wide development of
Speaker 1: industrial and sick relief, many building and loan associations, some
Speaker 1: cooperation of artisans, and considerable cooperation in retail trade.
Speaker 2: He was ready. He was like, I have a plan,
Speaker 2: Please follow it. It sounds like a dream. I mean,
Speaker 2: nobody took note. No one was like, wow, maybe that could.
Speaker 1: Thing that would work for us, That would have been
Speaker 1: a better plan overall. And that's like even like he's
Speaker 1: always waffling on like party politics or whatever. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are white parties. The Communist Party of US was
Speaker 1: like actually fairly black during this time period because they're
Speaker 1: the only political party in the US that was like
Speaker 1: consistently good about race issues during that time the whole
Speaker 1: like nineteen twenties nineteen forties era. They were like anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: that's besides the point, because I'm like people probably know
Speaker 1: this about me. I'm like not a big fan of
Speaker 1: the USSR, but I'm also not a big fan of
Speaker 1: the US government or whatever. But it's like, why does
Speaker 1: he need specific party politics and ideological lines. He laid
Speaker 1: out exactly what he's hoping will happen. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: comes from the black experience in America, not European ideology.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's again and incredible to me. Uh, the
Speaker 2: absolute choke whole power has to be like, oh no,
Speaker 2: we have we have the solutions. We're pretty clear on
Speaker 2: what would work and be most beneficial for most people.
Speaker 2: That's not a mystery. We don't need to solve it.
Speaker 2: We have the answers. We're just refuse to do it.
Speaker 2: You're just not going to even try it. No, Yeah,
Speaker 2: heaven't forbid. They see it works, long, don't do it.
Speaker 2: It's just crazy.
Speaker 1: Well, and we're going to get to that and probably
Speaker 1: on Wednesday's episode where they do. They prove a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff works, and then of course reaction comes
Speaker 1: and why supremacy comes and shuts a lot of it down.
Speaker 1: But so basically, he lays out a challenge to all
Speaker 1: of us because he saw how black Americans were absolutely
Speaker 1: the leaders in the realm of economic cooperation in the US.
Speaker 1: And it's possible that no group in history has ever
Speaker 1: pulled itself up economically from worse conditions against such fierce
Speaker 1: odds as Black America did after the Civil War. When
Speaker 1: I think about an America without Jim Crow and the KKK,
Speaker 1: like it would just be fucking unrecognizable today. Oh for sure,
Speaker 1: there's a reason that white people end up like literally
Speaker 1: bombing a place called Black Wall Street. Yeah, because Black
Speaker 1: Americans organized and fought in a thousand ways, and one
Speaker 1: of those ways was economically. Author Jessica Gordon Nemhard lays
Speaker 1: out a bunch of shit about how black cooperativism worked
Speaker 1: in the US that had it existed since the beginning,
Speaker 1: like actually goes back before the beginning of the US,
Speaker 1: That women have consistently taken the leading role in most
Speaker 1: of its organizations. Wow, oh yeah, it's the numbers aren't
Speaker 1: even close. We're gonna talk about it next episode. That
Speaker 1: many of the organizations were specifically cross class in a
Speaker 1: way that greatly strengthened them, and that basically all of
Speaker 1: them throughout time have been opposed, often violently and destructively,
Speaker 1: by white supremacy, and yet to spite that they've done
Speaker 1: so much, and so were we talking a little about
Speaker 1: what they did.
Speaker 2: Women are so great, y'all.
Speaker 1: I love women, I know they Yeah, like the black
Speaker 1: women organizing in this era just held down entire economies
Speaker 1: of Yeah, Like it's just fucking incredible. The history of
Speaker 1: black economic cooperation in resistance to racism and slavery in
Speaker 1: the US is older than the US itself. I think
Speaker 1: I've brought it up before on the show because it
Speaker 1: like blew my mind when I first found this out.
Speaker 1: You know, like when you think of insurance companies, you
Speaker 1: largely think of like evil capitalist things, right, Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know they have radical roots.
Speaker 2: Insurance has radical roots. You know what it would because
Speaker 2: insurance here to ensure that you are taking care of
Speaker 2: in difficult times and someone exactly I can make coin
Speaker 2: off of that. Wherefore, I know, human being suck.
Speaker 1: I know, insurance companies have their roots in mutual aid.
Speaker 1: In some ways, you could say mutual aid has its roots.
Speaker 1: Mutual aid is like a recognizable name. Practice kind of
Speaker 1: has its roots in old insurance companies. They like not companies,
Speaker 1: insurance associations.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Dubois traces the history of this legacy of cooperation back
Speaker 1: to Africa itself. He argues that despite the claims of
Speaker 1: the anthropology at the time enslave people. This is another
Speaker 1: one of those things that I think is common knowledge now,
Speaker 1: but like wasn't then. Basically at the time, people were like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: black people as soon as they got to America, they
Speaker 1: don't remember Africa. There's no connection to any cultural or
Speaker 1: religious traditions. That's you know, total blank slate. Instead, du
Speaker 1: Bois argues that people brought an awful lot over with them,
Speaker 1: since they were people who had memories.
Speaker 2: Full, full lives, remember their stories. Yeah, I've been watching
Speaker 2: and learning a lot about Black culinary.
Speaker 1: Traditions that have been oh cool.
Speaker 2: From West Africa to here. They're interesting maps where they
Speaker 2: lay out, you know, soil conditions in different parts of
Speaker 2: West Africa, and they're like you'll see here they were
Speaker 2: growing rice, and then the rice were growing the same
Speaker 2: way here, and then in the architecture of a lot
Speaker 2: of southern buildings. You can see similar designs in like
Speaker 2: ancient African architecture, specifically West African architecture, where like the
Speaker 2: way the they're low and flat so that wind can
Speaker 2: blow across the top and keep the lower parts cooler,
Speaker 2: things features like that, and so it's yeah, it's everywhere,
Speaker 2: and it's again, it's wild to think how intensely woven
Speaker 2: enslaved people were to everyday culture and society. People were like,
Speaker 2: they're not doing anything here, just like you couldn't get dressed,
Speaker 2: you couldn't feed yourself, you couldn't like farmer lands like
Speaker 2: literally over here doing everything entertaining your damn children, like
Speaker 2: making sure they don't get killed, like so much. And
Speaker 2: then to like the willful arrogance to be like what
Speaker 2: they've had no effect, yes, is not totally.
Speaker 1: And also that those people are lazy, You mean, the
Speaker 1: people who've built your house and feed you and take
Speaker 1: care of your children and brush your hair.
Speaker 2: Literally in the fields while you're chilling on the porch,
Speaker 2: like god it's hot. These lazy assholes making sure my
Speaker 2: life runs well. Y'all were crazy, ah, so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so once people got here, got here, and
Speaker 1: so once people were stolen and fucking trafficked, a ton
Speaker 1: of people started organizing help one another out in all
Speaker 1: kinds of different ways. Enslaved people on a plantation might
Speaker 1: collectively tend a small garden plot for themselves. They organized
Speaker 1: to buy one another freedom. Maroon communities start popping up everywhere.
Speaker 1: This is like one of my favorite things to cover.
Speaker 1: I will always when I find out about new Maroon community.
Speaker 1: It's an easy roon communities are there are these? They're
Speaker 1: gorilla societies, uh like gorilla with EU or u E,
Speaker 1: populated mostly by self freed black people and Indigenous people
Speaker 1: with the occasional poor white family. And these Maroon communities,
Speaker 1: many of which lasted for generations, would have totally different
Speaker 1: social orders in the societies around them. And a lot
Speaker 1: of these societies were very cooperative. Also, they sometimes go
Speaker 1: raid slave society and that's cool too, Margaret.
Speaker 2: Okay, oh my god, huh. I literally touched the hem
Speaker 2: of this in my research. I was telling Margaret before
Speaker 2: that I've been doing a lot of research on who
Speaker 2: do practicing enslaved folk like pre Civil War, and what
Speaker 2: I learned is like, typically a lot of these wait,
Speaker 2: what was the word users.
Speaker 1: It was not in my maroon towny, Maroon societies.
Speaker 2: Societies, maroone societies, so.
Speaker 1: Apparently communities or colonies or yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I read about a couple of them and they were
Speaker 2: saying that they would specifically choose like difficult territory to
Speaker 2: it was like deep deep deep with the swamp on
Speaker 2: the islands that you have to like swim or like
Speaker 2: you have a boat to get to. And I was like,
Speaker 2: this is so cool. It's legit. How I script Okay,
Speaker 2: I can't even talk about it, but I'm so excited
Speaker 2: when you do an episode on them, will you please
Speaker 2: invite me because I am so curious to learn more.
Speaker 2: I think it's the coolest thing to just be like
Speaker 2: part of the reason because you know, when you think
Speaker 2: about when I think about my black friends who have
Speaker 2: a firm grip on the history of our people in
Speaker 2: this country, there are folks who grew up like in
Speaker 2: deeply embedded black cultures, right so like yes, church, but
Speaker 2: also school, like they had black teachers growing up, which
Speaker 2: a lot of black kids, Like I had my black
Speaker 2: teacher until my third year of college. Yeah, like I
Speaker 2: just were like outside of my imediate family and then
Speaker 2: we go visit, extended family just wasn't there. And so
Speaker 2: I say all that just to say, like, it's it's
Speaker 2: interesting to think that a lot of the reasons this
Speaker 2: information isn't getting passed over to like white kids, Like
Speaker 2: a lot of that information is like this is for
Speaker 2: don't know, this is for us, we're over here. It's
Speaker 2: like the first time I saw Daughters of the Dust,
Speaker 2: which is essentially about a maroon community society of people
Speaker 2: like living out there. I uh, I think the beautiful.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to learn more about them. I've got
Speaker 2: really guests.
Speaker 1: Sorry, I didn't know that they were so prevalent. Like
Speaker 1: I first heard of this one called the Great and
Speaker 1: the Great Dismal Swamp in northeast North Carolina, and frankly,
Speaker 1: I first heard about it because like white radicals love
Speaker 1: when there's like white people in the story. Of course,
Speaker 1: like we talk a lot about John Brown and shit
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, and the Great Dismal Swamp. There's like
Speaker 1: this version of the story that there was like also
Speaker 1: poor white people living there, and that's probably true, but
Speaker 1: if so, it's like way less important than people talk about.
Speaker 1: But the thing so then you're like, oh, there was
Speaker 1: this one maroon society or you hear about these ones
Speaker 1: in other countries or things like that, and slowly you're
Speaker 1: like these were fucking everywhere, Like this is like not
Speaker 1: you couldn't have a slave society without it being interspersed
Speaker 1: with pockets of freedom. Yeah, no matter how hard they tried,
Speaker 1: and they literally invented policing in order to try and
Speaker 1: stop this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: You sure did.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that gets kind of played up,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the versions of this is like
Speaker 1: and then they would go raid slave Society and bring
Speaker 1: into clare war on slave Society and like that's like
Speaker 1: kinda true, but also a lot of the Maroon communities
Speaker 1: were like, don't go fucking rating. Well, like fucking they'll
Speaker 1: come shut us down.
Speaker 2: Like no, right, first of all, like let's be smart
Speaker 2: about it. Okay, we got to protect everybody here, Like
Speaker 2: for sure, let's get some people out, but like also
Speaker 2: the ones who handle your shu, because again, there are
Speaker 2: so many people here already. The deeper tectae. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: imagine it would be a highly selective, highly organized operations
Speaker 2: and not just pitchforks. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the rating was like pretty but a lot of
Speaker 1: the actual organizations of them were somewhat informal. But then again,
Speaker 1: we did an episode about I don't remember what the
Speaker 1: main topic was, it was probably it was about Brazil
Speaker 1: and there was this like king, a black king, living
Speaker 1: in the mountains of in a maroon community in Brazil
Speaker 1: with like an army, a palace, and it was like
Speaker 1: it was kind of wild. So there's that one and
Speaker 1: then another for anyone who's listening is like, I want
Speaker 1: to already hear episodes. We did an episode about Fort
Speaker 1: Negro in Florida, which was not part of the US
Speaker 1: at the time, which was a very militant run society
Speaker 1: that started from black British soldiers. Okay, so much listening
Speaker 1: to do market Yeah, no, I'm like, I'll probably have
Speaker 1: you on for Great Dismal Swamp. I've been planning to
Speaker 1: do that one for a while. So in addition to
Speaker 1: these maroon communities, you also have entire secret societies that
Speaker 1: formed about which we know very little because they're secret societies.
Speaker 1: But we know a little bit about them, partly because
Speaker 1: there's that not actually secret societies. The Masons, the Freemasons,
Speaker 1: they get tied into this story too in a positive way.
Speaker 2: The conspiracy theorists are going to be clocking a lot
Speaker 2: of things. I know.
Speaker 1: Well conspiracy theorists. Black Freemasons in the US are older
Speaker 1: than the US. On March sixth, seventeen seventy five, a
Speaker 1: year before the US fifteen Free Black Men were initiated
Speaker 1: into Freemasonry, soon forming the African Lodge number four fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Then they formed a national Grand Lodge of three other lodges. Wow,
Speaker 1: one of the biggest, the two biggest centers of the
Speaker 1: cooperative organ that we're going to be talking about. One
Speaker 1: of them is the secret societies and the other is churches.
Speaker 1: Dubois rites, Oh, this ties into what you were actually
Speaker 1: talking about. He's going to use outdated terminology for this,
Speaker 1: Dubois writes. It was not, at first, by any means,
Speaker 1: a Christian church, but rather an adaptation of those Heathen
Speaker 1: rights which we roughly designate by the term obi worship
Speaker 1: of Voodooism. Association and missionary effort soon gave these rights
Speaker 1: a veneer of Christianity, and gradually, after two centuries, the
Speaker 1: church became Christian with a Calvinistic creed and with many
Speaker 1: of the old customs still clinging to the services. It
Speaker 1: is this historic fact that the Negro Church of today
Speaker 1: bases itself on one of the few surviving social institutions
Speaker 1: of the African fatherland that accounts for its extraordinary growth
Speaker 1: and vitality.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I mean, if you think of all the
Speaker 2: things that sertifically think of coming out of a church,
Speaker 2: and then you distill it down to the who do is,
Speaker 2: which is essentially a practice of non faith based rituals
Speaker 2: that are meant to invoke either healing or inspiration or protection.
Speaker 2: These were These were again women again, the protectors, again
Speaker 2: the organizers and based of the community. These were people
Speaker 2: often bringing children into the world is duels or you know, midwives.
Speaker 2: And it's yeah, it's fascinating to consider. I had I
Speaker 2: had the link of as Christianity was forced on enslaged people,
Speaker 2: the rituals and traditions of the Christian Church were intermingled
Speaker 2: with who do but linking that then to organize movements.
Speaker 2: I hadn't had that chain link yet.
Speaker 1: No, And it's he makes it like it's one of
Speaker 1: the main things that du Bois ends up writing about
Speaker 1: in this piece is about partly because there's more information
Speaker 1: about how the church groups did it right. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's like like syncretic Christianity is something that is really
Speaker 1: interesting as relates to I've studied more about a colonization
Speaker 1: like Ireland, right, you know, you have the Irish Catholics
Speaker 1: that are a syncretic faith that is still believes in
Speaker 1: fairy wells up until like the eighteen hundreds, which is
Speaker 1: like fourteen hundred years after they all supposedly became Christians.
Speaker 1: You know. And this isn't to say that the Black
Speaker 1: churches today are not fully Christian, just that syncretism and
Speaker 1: the transition of religion is like a more complicated and
Speaker 1: interesting process than people give it credit for. Absolutely, the
Speaker 1: church became one of the centers of black cooperative life
Speaker 1: and through that one of the centers of revolt and
Speaker 1: also building cooperative economies, which are not wholly separate things.
Speaker 1: Several of the most ambitious slaver vaults in the US
Speaker 1: grew out of Black churches. Take for example, Denmark Vesse.
Speaker 1: Denmark Vessey was a black man who bought his way
Speaker 1: out of slavery in South Carolina. He literally won a
Speaker 1: lottery and was like, sweet by me, that's what I want.
Speaker 2: Holy Molly, that it would be the luckiest day.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, wow, I know.
Speaker 2: And also how chet it's like watching kids try to
Speaker 2: get into schools by winning a lottery. You're like, this
Speaker 2: probably shouldn't be how that words sign?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, God, so he's free and he starts an
Speaker 1: African Methodist Episcopal congregation in South Carolina and immediately starts
Speaker 1: illegally teaching in slave kids how to read, which is
Speaker 1: a fucking cool thing to do.
Speaker 2: It's fucking awesome.
Speaker 1: Then he wasn't able. He's a carpenter, and he makes
Speaker 1: enough money that he should be able to buy his
Speaker 1: wife and children their freedom. Their owner won't sell bitch, Okay,
Speaker 1: So he did what any reasonable person would do and
Speaker 1: tried to overthrow the slave empire of the United States
Speaker 1: of America.
Speaker 2: What other options have you left me? I tried you
Speaker 2: pay Dan, you said no, So.
Speaker 1: I know I have to fight you. I genuinely like
Speaker 1: I would watch this movie like that is a perfectly
Speaker 1: natural and worthy conclusion to reach. Yes, he planned for
Speaker 1: a revolt on the Steel Day, and this is okay.
Speaker 1: So it's like been proven and Corty did this. But
Speaker 1: there's like, like, if you read the Wikipedia about this,
Speaker 1: for example, it's all written in the like was accused
Speaker 1: of not like totally absolutely did, But I think all
Speaker 1: this is cool as shit. So I'm just gonna say did,
Speaker 1: because he like you do the crime you do the
Speaker 1: time you can brag about it, whether he did it
Speaker 1: or not. You know what, I like this rule. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a friend I probably brought this up before.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who was like convicted of all
Speaker 1: of the property destruction out of protest in Pittsburgh. Like
Speaker 1: they were like, you smashed every window that was broken,
Speaker 1: which was like physically impossible for him to have done. Sure,
Speaker 1: and then he like went to prison about it for
Speaker 1: a while. And now I'm like, yeah, you could tell
Speaker 1: people you broke every window.
Speaker 2: He they absolutely could. Absolutely, I did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah the time it was me, I teleport.
Speaker 2: I'm amazing for having done it. Yeah, exactly, You're welcome. Wow.
Speaker 1: So he planned a revolt for b Steel Day July fourteenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty two. Thousands of people enslaved and free alike,
Speaker 1: almost all but not exclusively black, were in on this plan. Wow.
Speaker 1: Two fucking people out of those thousands snitched them out?
Speaker 2: Now? Was it? Bring them forward? Got to take this
Speaker 2: beating because what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone gets rounded up. Thirty five people, including VESSI,
Speaker 1: are hanged. Of course, the four white conspirators were off
Speaker 1: let off waylighter. They weren't the snitches.
Speaker 2: I know for sure.
Speaker 1: They were let off way lighter. I mean just literally
Speaker 1: because they're white, right, and they get a few months
Speaker 1: in prison each, I think they're in court, they're able
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, I was totally doing it for money,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: And so therefore it's it's a job. Yeah, you could
Speaker 2: understand money. What else could I do? What? Oh? God,
Speaker 2: capitalism you wild? Wow? This whole system trash wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But I will say one, Okay, clearly, this uprising
Speaker 1: did not destroy the slave Empire of the United States,
Speaker 1: but his kids lived became free because they survived long
Speaker 1: enough to see the end of legal chattel slavery in
Speaker 1: the United States. And this these insurrections, you throw enough
Speaker 1: sparks and eventually fire catches, and that's what ended slavery.
Speaker 1: So that's one way the church was involved, is that
Speaker 1: he was you know, he ran a church.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Nat Turner probably the most famous rebel in Southern history.
Speaker 1: And I'm not going to talk about him because I'm
Speaker 1: planning to do the whole thing about him. He was
Speaker 1: a preacher also, but because the church was where people
Speaker 1: would meet and try and overthrow the slave empire, it
Speaker 1: was under constant scrutiny from the evil Empire. The enforcers
Speaker 1: of that evil empire, and still people organized despite all
Speaker 1: of that. And we'll talk about what they organized on Wednesday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but first we could talk about the stuff that you do.
Speaker 1: And I mean producing is literally a form of organization,
Speaker 1: but you know it's not the only thing you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh, it's not what even Yeah, I think mostly
Speaker 2: right now, I've been working with a friend to get
Speaker 2: her film production company up. She has this radical idea
Speaker 2: of how to make filmmaking a mentally healthy and safe
Speaker 2: space to work, which it is currently not. It is
Speaker 2: both our passion. She comes from a poor background. I
Speaker 2: come from a middle class background, but we neither of
Speaker 2: us have money to start this career. Took a long time,
Speaker 2: you know, And so we're working on like how do
Speaker 2: you create ethical hours and still make your day and
Speaker 2: get your shots? How do you film difficult scenes in
Speaker 2: a way that both protects the performers but also everyone
Speaker 2: working around that scene. And it's been a great honor,
Speaker 2: and so where our film is, we're applying to festivals
Speaker 2: right now, and it's something I hope to be doing
Speaker 2: more of and bringing more of that into some of
Speaker 2: my other spaces, like my program at here at iHeart
Speaker 2: Next up where we train and develop folks who've never
Speaker 2: made podcasts before but have interesting stories to tell.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I think it's sort of the form of organizing I
Speaker 2: found I can take on right now. Is helping people
Speaker 2: who want to have careers and the arts find ways
Speaker 2: to do it in a way that's financially reasonable. Money
Speaker 2: is keeping people out of the arts. It's really bothering me.
Speaker 2: So this is my one little way in. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess that's kind of what I do outside of work.
Speaker 2: But again, always it's just more work.
Speaker 1: But I mean that stuff matters, And like the idea
Speaker 1: of like, you know, we complain a lot about how
Speaker 1: tech culture wants to like work everyone to death, right,
Speaker 1: you know. Tech culture is like, oh, if you don't
Speaker 1: work eighty hours a week for my tech startup, you
Speaker 1: don't care about it, yea, And like where did they
Speaker 1: get that idea from? Well, nonprofits and the arts are
Speaker 1: the two places where that has been the norm forever,
Speaker 1: where everyone working on a project is expected like, well,
Speaker 1: since you care about it, you're going to work yourself
Speaker 1: to death over it.
Speaker 2: You know, it's so unnecessary. You can make beautiful, impactful
Speaker 2: art without having to feel like shit without missing out
Speaker 2: on important life events, without stressing yourself into like an
Speaker 2: unrecognizable shape. Yeah. So yeah, more of that if you
Speaker 2: can find spaces to do it within your own life.
Speaker 2: I say, tecklate, it's been rather rewarding.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. My plug this week is that today if
Speaker 1: you're listening on the day that drops, which is June tenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, the kickstarter for my book, The Sapling Cage,
Speaker 1: my debut novel. I've written a ton of novellas and
Speaker 1: short story collections and all kinds of other books, but
Speaker 1: I've never written a novel that well, okay, I ghost
Speaker 1: wrote some romance novels, but I'm not allowed to say
Speaker 1: that I did that. Well, I'm not allowed to tell
Speaker 1: you what they are. My debut novel, The Sapling Cage,
Speaker 1: is being kickstarted as of today, and you can find
Speaker 1: it on Kickstarter and you can pre order it there,
Speaker 1: and I'm really excited about it. I'm trying to make
Speaker 1: this the biggest book debut of my career, and you
Speaker 1: all can help buy backing it. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a blurb for my own book. I didn't write
Speaker 1: this blurb. Another author, Nissi Shall wrote this blurb, simple, strange,
Speaker 1: and elegantly effective. The Sapling Cage begins Margaret Kiljoy's anarchist
Speaker 1: fantasy series with an engrossing story of the struggles between
Speaker 1: tax collecting knights, barfly thieves, and apprentice witches still too
Speaker 1: raw to use the magic they can barely see out
Speaker 1: of the corners of their eyes. There are goodies and
Speaker 1: baddies of all genders. There's bullying monsters and healing rainbows
Speaker 1: and rotten scheming nobles. This book was so gripping that,
Speaker 1: though I tried my best to slow down as the
Speaker 1: end came rushing nearer and nearer, I just couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: Now that I've reached the last page, the only thing
Speaker 1: keeping me from crying about it is the knowledge that
Speaker 1: there's more of Killjoy's glorious epic to come.
Speaker 2: I'm soul. That's a really good one.
Speaker 1: Ah, thanks Margaret.
Speaker 2: Wow, Okay, got some chills and very excited. That's gonna
Speaker 2: be fun.
Speaker 1: Thanks, and you all can hear more about the story
Speaker 1: of this podcast, well, not the story about the podcast. Whatever,
Speaker 1: come back. We're gonna have another episode of this on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Talk to you then, Hi, Margaret, here just with one
Speaker 1: more plug. If you're listening to this episode on the
Speaker 1: day it came out, on June tenth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: then this will be timely. And if you're listening some
Speaker 1: other time you can still hear it. It'll still sadly
Speaker 1: be timely, because tomorrow is June eleventh, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a statement about what that means. June eleventh
Speaker 1: is the International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and
Speaker 1: long term anarchist prisoners. This day seeks to strengthen the
Speaker 1: connections between those behind the prison walls and those of
Speaker 1: us on the outside through benefit events, actions, and spreading
Speaker 1: the names and stories of our friends locked away since
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. This day intends to address the specific issues
Speaker 1: facing long term prisoners and strives to build a network
Speaker 1: of solidarity that has built on memory, action, and remaining
Speaker 1: unyielding in the face of repression. To learn more about
Speaker 1: the history of June eleventh, the prisoners we support, or
Speaker 1: to get some ideas for organizing a June eleventh event
Speaker 1: where you live, visit June one one dot org.
Speaker 4: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 4: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: Visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 4: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 4: your podcasts.
Speaker 2: M