Speaker 1: Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to
Speaker 1: welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher. I am
Speaker 1: your host, Rams this Job.
Speaker 2: He is Rams this Job. I am q Ward. You
Speaker 2: are tuned into Civic Socic.
Speaker 1: Indeed you are, and there is a lot to stick
Speaker 1: around for a lot to talk about today. Listen, man,
Speaker 1: We've been hearing and seeing a lot of back and
Speaker 1: forth on our social media and the comments. And I
Speaker 1: know that our timelines don't look any different from yours
Speaker 1: because there's a lot going on in this crazy world.
Speaker 1: And trust and believe that we are doing our best
Speaker 1: to fight the good fight. And today that train don't stop.
Speaker 1: We have a special guest that will be joining us.
Speaker 1: We really think it's important to introduce this man to
Speaker 1: you because we are fans of his work. We've had
Speaker 1: a chance to talk to him before on the Black
Speaker 1: Information Network, and we have the honor of having him
Speaker 1: joined us today. He goes by the name of THEO. E. J. Wilson.
Speaker 1: You may know him from the viral ted talk that
Speaker 1: he did where he went undercover as a white supremacist
Speaker 1: even though in the real world, in real life he's
Speaker 1: a black man. But what he learned a lot. What
Speaker 1: he learned about was how algorithms work and how we
Speaker 1: can find ourselves in these sort of digital echo chambers.
Speaker 1: And he has some really interesting and compelling thoughts about that.
Speaker 1: Now that's just one thing you may know about him.
Speaker 1: Of course, he does a whole lot of other things,
Speaker 1: and I want to talk to him about all those
Speaker 1: things and so much more. Also, we have a really
Speaker 1: really special Biba today for becoming a better Ally there's
Speaker 1: a person that we subscribe to who really needs our help.
Speaker 1: So we want you to stick around for that as well,
Speaker 1: so that we can give you some game on how
Speaker 1: you can help us and help this individual make the
Speaker 1: world a little bit better of the place. So all
Speaker 1: that and more to stick around for. But first and foremost,
Speaker 1: like we always do at this time, I think we
Speaker 1: should start things off on a high note some Ebony excellence.
Speaker 1: How does that sound cute? Shall we? We shall? And
Speaker 1: so today Ebony Excellence, as always is sponsored by Major
Speaker 1: Threads for Innovative Fashionable Sports where check majorthreads dot com.
Speaker 1: And we're going to highlight two individuals that really need
Speaker 1: no introduction, rock Him and Scarface, and how we're highlighting
Speaker 1: them is by bringing some attention to a new initiative
Speaker 1: that is taking place to honor hip hop legends just
Speaker 1: like these too. So this comes from Black enterprise honoring
Speaker 1: Rock Him and Scarface. Hip hop has created a lot
Speaker 1: of millionaires and even billionaires in its fifty year history,
Speaker 1: but some early pioneers never got their just due, and NAS,
Speaker 1: Steve Stout, and others are looking to change that. NAS
Speaker 1: and Stout have joined forces with Andresen Horwitz, co founder
Speaker 1: Ben Horwitz and his wife Felicia Horwitz to pay homage
Speaker 1: to hip hop pioneers through financial support. The inaugural hip
Speaker 1: Hop Grandmaster Awards will take place November seventeenth and honor
Speaker 1: hip hop legends Rock Him and Scarface, and a celebration
Speaker 1: where one hundred percent of proceeds will go to support
Speaker 1: hip hop greats and other creatives. Many pioneers, like Scarface
Speaker 1: and Rock Him were ahead of their time in shaping
Speaker 1: hip hop culture before the art form received the financial
Speaker 1: backing and success that came in the late nineties and
Speaker 1: early two thousands. Because of this, the Paid in Full
Speaker 1: Foundation intends to right the wrongs by securing a financial
Speaker 1: future for many of those early trailblazers. The Paid in
Speaker 1: Full Foundation aims to rectify that through its grant making
Speaker 1: program by both honoring the people who built hip hop
Speaker 1: and enabling them to pursue their creative and intellectual pursuits
Speaker 1: for the benefit of society. And again, honoring rock Him
Speaker 1: and Scarface feels entirely appropriate because those two are examples
Speaker 1: of excellence. Those two are people that fought fights that
Speaker 1: are unimaginable. For us to bring hip hop to where
Speaker 1: it is, to where we are able to enjoy this
Speaker 1: culture and share this culture with other people, and you know,
Speaker 1: globally with a global audience, and for them getting their
Speaker 1: just due and the credit, I think that's entirely appropriate.
Speaker 1: So now onto the man of the hour, mister THEO. E. J. Wilson.
Speaker 1: So I told the listeners a little bit about you know,
Speaker 1: your your TED talk, but I know that there's so
Speaker 1: much more that you're working on, not the least of
Speaker 1: which is I know you were working with the UH,
Speaker 1: there was a TV show that you were working on,
Speaker 1: and a whole lot of other things. And you can
Speaker 1: give yourself the proper introduction. I know full well your capabilities,
Speaker 1: but again, say hi to our listeners and give them
Speaker 1: a little bit of background about yourself.
Speaker 3: How y'all doing, Man, I am honored to be on
Speaker 3: this show. We've been working on this for a long time.
Speaker 3: Long time, Yeah, for sure. Listen, man, I am. I
Speaker 3: tried a poet. Actually, I began my career thinking that
Speaker 3: I was a rapper, you know, and rap evolved into
Speaker 3: spoken word, and spoken word got paved into activists, and
Speaker 3: these things combined led to being a Slam poetry champion,
Speaker 3: which opened the doors to the ted X mile high
Speaker 3: stage and doing the talk about my experiment going under
Speaker 3: cover in the al right, which I thought was the
Speaker 3: most useless part of any bit of my time that
Speaker 3: I could even indulge in. But it went viral because
Speaker 3: they released at the weekend that Charlottesville happened. That opened
Speaker 3: a whole lot of doors, got me on the national scene.
Speaker 3: I am the host of a TV show on the
Speaker 3: History Channel. You can check out if you go to
Speaker 3: History dot com right now, check out. I was there and.
Speaker 1: That was it. Sorry, okay, brother, it's all good.
Speaker 3: Listen. And I supposed that my grasp on history showed
Speaker 3: up in poetry as the grandson of a Tuskegee Airman.
Speaker 3: My grandfather was Theobald Wilson of the ninety ninth Pursuit
Speaker 3: Squadron and the Tuskegee Airmen, and so just having a
Speaker 3: background as a member of a blackest door family, so
Speaker 3: they helped out a lot for the History Channel gig.
Speaker 3: But I'm here to help and I use all of
Speaker 3: my gifts to the best of my abilities to move
Speaker 3: us towards liberation.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So what I want you to do is for
Speaker 1: the people that may not know specifically what your experience
Speaker 1: was like going in your experiment going underground in the
Speaker 1: alt right, talk a little bit about that, why that
Speaker 1: was an important experience, and talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: what you learned. And then I do want to talk
Speaker 1: about the show. I was there as well.
Speaker 3: So that's what's up.
Speaker 1: Brother.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something. I started going viral on
Speaker 3: my own Facebook page first because I was making Black
Speaker 3: Lives Matter content. This was like twenty fifteen, brother, So
Speaker 3: you know Eric Garner had recently been killed. You had
Speaker 3: the situation with Ferguson going down. Around this time, Tana
Speaker 3: Hasey Coats had just written the Case for Reparations, which
Speaker 3: was the first video that I ever made that went
Speaker 3: viral because you know, it's a great article, but as
Speaker 3: long win as a I figured out a condensing talking
Speaker 3: in a way that the brothers from the hood can understand.
Speaker 3: So when that went viral, it opened me up for
Speaker 3: a lot of praise and a whole lot of hate
Speaker 3: because we weren't talking about echo chambers at that time.
Speaker 3: There was a whole lot of talk around black lives
Speaker 3: matter versus all lives matter. So I got trolled and
Speaker 3: I started wondering what world are they living in? Man?
Speaker 3: Because they kept sending me the same missing formed alt
Speaker 3: fact memes, and it was coming at me from all
Speaker 3: different angles. I figured that there was probably some information
Speaker 3: I was missing. And at that time, I had a
Speaker 3: buddy named Quincy who worked at a marketing firm. He's
Speaker 3: the one who first uttered the words target marketing algorithm
Speaker 3: to me. I never heard that word before. Before I
Speaker 3: knew it, I started realizing that there was black people,
Speaker 3: that there was white supremacists making fake profiles on black Twitter.
Speaker 3: I said, the author city of y'all to do something
Speaker 3: like that, So I said, I guess two can play
Speaker 3: that game. So when I made the profile, I don't
Speaker 3: think it took me more than ten minutes to make
Speaker 3: this profile. This was twenty fifteen, so remember Obama was
Speaker 3: still president. We didn't know if Trump could win. Hillary
Speaker 3: Clinton seemed inevitable, at least those who are left leading,
Speaker 3: and the experiment, as I got bounced down the echo chamber,
Speaker 3: little by little, I saw how big this was. I
Speaker 3: saw that for a black man, the recurrence of open
Speaker 3: face fascist white supremacy was an existential threat. I had
Speaker 3: no choice, in my opinion, but to figure out how
Speaker 3: big this threat was. And after about eight months, I
Speaker 3: had to shut it down do the mental health concerns.
Speaker 3: But I didn't talk about that in the Ted talk.
Speaker 3: But I knew that Trump had a good chance of
Speaker 3: winning because of that experiment, and sure enough he did.
Speaker 2: I like to ask before we continue, I'm assuming a
Speaker 2: lot of that criticism and hate and strange rhetoric that
Speaker 2: probably caught you off guard came from people that looked
Speaker 2: like us. Did you process that and how did you
Speaker 2: deal with that?
Speaker 1: Oh man?
Speaker 3: The old step in fetched effect. Brother, So at that time,
Speaker 3: there wasn't a whole lot of it. Candice Omens was like,
Speaker 3: for example, she was fringe at that time. She wasn't
Speaker 3: as mainstream as she is now. They were more laughable.
Speaker 3: The hodds Twins hadn't even switched over to that side yet, right,
Speaker 3: And so mainly at the end of the experiment, they
Speaker 3: started becoming more of a factor in those chat rooms
Speaker 3: and on those websites and in those YouTube spaces. That's
Speaker 3: how I began to realize that what was more prescient
Speaker 3: was the need need for validation from black voices. This
Speaker 3: was huge, right, because what these black voices were doing
Speaker 3: was putting the stamp of approval on the white supremacist
Speaker 3: narrative that says, see, yeah, it's not just me who
Speaker 3: things like that, I'm not racist. These are just the
Speaker 3: quote facts. And the authority of blackness that or the
Speaker 3: authority of anybody who suffered oppression, is what the oppressor
Speaker 3: can wait to put on the narrati because it's the
Speaker 3: final nail in the coffin as they dehumanize the oppressed.
Speaker 3: So they were used as a currency, if you will,
Speaker 3: to absolve their consciousness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've seen that.
Speaker 2: There will always be space for for us to jump
Speaker 2: aboard that train and give it some you know, some value.
Speaker 2: But even before the experiment, when you were doing Black
Speaker 2: Lives Matter, videos and speaking up on our behalf. And
Speaker 2: I'm only asking this because Ramses and I have dealt
Speaker 2: with a lot of push from our own people when
Speaker 2: it comes to standing up for us. Did you get
Speaker 2: any type of strange resistance or pushback from black people
Speaker 2: when you first started saying things like black lives matter
Speaker 2: and started getting those all lives matter responses?
Speaker 3: They were not as prevalent as they are now, which
Speaker 3: is one of the things that I think is a
Speaker 3: changing of the tide, if you will. So I did
Speaker 3: get a couple of those voices, but they were largely ridiculed.
Speaker 3: They had no cloud. And I will say that when
Speaker 3: you talk about black people who vibe for white approval
Speaker 3: in that way, they I have often found, began down
Speaker 3: that path after experiencing deep black rejection. Black rejection is
Speaker 3: a hard thing to take, man, What.
Speaker 1: Do you mean when you say black rejection?
Speaker 3: They've been rejected by black people to some extent peraps
Speaker 3: they're in the interracial relationship. Perhaps they had a viewpoint
Speaker 3: that wasn't necessarily on cod with what a lot of
Speaker 3: other black folks feel.
Speaker 1: I know what you mean.
Speaker 3: And white people provided a warmer.
Speaker 1: Space, ye, soft space to land.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, And that is a very interesting human dynamic,
Speaker 3: because humans are social beings before we are any other
Speaker 3: dimension anything else.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so.
Speaker 3: If the white folks who were conservative leaning provided a
Speaker 3: soft space to land a warmer set of arms for
Speaker 3: those black folks who said or did something in their
Speaker 3: life that put them on the ouse of the majority
Speaker 3: of black folks, that was pretty much the thing that
Speaker 3: sealed the deal for them switching over to the other side.
Speaker 3: And then, and I haven't talked to many people about this,
Speaker 3: not even in my university lecturers. The bag for being
Speaker 3: a black conservative.
Speaker 1: Boy, the bag.
Speaker 3: Listen the bag. Right after the talk with Viral, I
Speaker 3: got hit up by Jared Taylor and some other far
Speaker 3: right voices. Millionaires and billionaires has said, if you go
Speaker 3: to college campuses speak against Black lives matter, we may
Speaker 3: be able to make it worth your while. These conservative
Speaker 3: college campuses, the ones who bring in Ben Shapiro, the
Speaker 3: ones who bring in canpus old ones, the ones who
Speaker 3: can't wait to hear from Larry Elder and Thomas Soul
Speaker 3: up in your face all the time. Those turning Point
Speaker 3: USA college groups will pay triple to quadruple which you
Speaker 3: will get paid in a college environment, speaking on behalf
Speaker 3: of what we know is the right side of history,
Speaker 3: which is the black voice in academia.
Speaker 1: That is wow, heavy bag wow bro. One of the
Speaker 1: things that we deal with is a lot of pushback
Speaker 1: on our social media and a lot of trops, and
Speaker 1: I think that's the nature of social media. Some of
Speaker 1: it is well intentioned, some of it is, you know,
Speaker 1: people trying to debate, but I think the nature of
Speaker 1: the communication doesn't really lend itself to people understanding and
Speaker 1: it really just allows people to get a bar off
Speaker 1: and feel better about it or two bars off, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't really lend itself to people understanding each other
Speaker 1: and believe it or not. As long as I have
Speaker 1: been a broadcaster, and qu's been a broadcaster, this is
Speaker 1: something that, at least for me, I'm just now learning.
Speaker 1: I thought that for a long time, I thought that
Speaker 1: you could really convince people by using an objective truth
Speaker 1: and really an appeal to humanity. And it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: the forum. People will see that and will understand your perspective.
Speaker 1: And the fact of the matter is that I've had
Speaker 1: to learn that. Un Fortunately, your ted talk really helped
Speaker 1: us when we were making the foundation for this show.
Speaker 1: I mentioned this to you before the last time that
Speaker 1: we spoke, but one of the things that we do
Speaker 1: here is we subscribe to some far right content on
Speaker 1: like Reddit and on like Quora and all these places
Speaker 1: where these groups tend to find a framework to exchange
Speaker 1: their ideas and so kind of leaning into those conversations
Speaker 1: that those people are having. We don't contribute or anything
Speaker 1: like that. But seeing how echo chambers do the same
Speaker 1: thing as the comments section, it's just people getting a
Speaker 1: bar off here and there. Nobody's really talking, nobody's challenging
Speaker 1: in each other's views, and the people that really try
Speaker 1: to change something or add or contribute something, they're just
Speaker 1: it's spent energy. I realize it's an important part of
Speaker 1: any sort of brand offering. But that was a hard
Speaker 1: lesson for me because I got a chance to see
Speaker 1: head on exactly what we're up against. And I feel
Speaker 1: like that's very consistent with what it was that you
Speaker 1: were saying, at least in that Ted talk.
Speaker 3: Well, the human beings are socially reinforced creatures, and we
Speaker 3: are very vulnerable to applause in a certain direction. And
Speaker 3: it made me introspective upon which applause I might be
Speaker 3: unconsciously seeking. However, the thing that grounded me was history.
Speaker 3: The thing that grounded me was an understanding of how
Speaker 3: we got here in the context of the present moment.
Speaker 3: And what I can see is that the beast of
Speaker 3: white supremacy, or should a friend of mine calls white misanthropy,
Speaker 3: is in its final days. But it's had many days,
Speaker 3: and the days of its finality will be long, because
Speaker 3: what's going on is that it's losing the narrative war
Speaker 3: and it's losing the demographic war. So it is striving
Speaker 3: to recruit new voices and new faces to be avatars
Speaker 3: for its mission. However, the overwhelming tide of history is
Speaker 3: against it, and it's going to take longer than I
Speaker 3: thought too. But ultimately reality asserts itself and the facts
Speaker 3: speak for themselves, and in time, it's a historical bend.
Speaker 3: The way that it don't want to look at it
Speaker 3: and shut down critical race theory quote unquote don't want
Speaker 3: to talk about black history means that it is hiding
Speaker 3: from itself who it truly is and how it will
Speaker 3: eventually fall. And so you just got to trust the
Speaker 3: tide of time to do a lot of the work
Speaker 3: for you and plant a seed with what you got
Speaker 3: in the time that you've been allotted.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 2: So you were in this space kind of bumping into
Speaker 2: these you know, somewhat bought accounts, you know, people who
Speaker 2: might appear to be black, who might appear to be
Speaker 2: hip hop or urban or young or you know, cool,
Speaker 2: quote unquote, and you discovered something within the algorithm that
Speaker 2: sent you down a path that I know our listeners
Speaker 2: are going to be like, whoa. So please start from
Speaker 2: the beginning. Tell us about I was there, how that started,
Speaker 2: how that experience was for you. Because when I first
Speaker 2: heard about that, brother, I was blown away. And then
Speaker 2: Ramses was like, yo, you gotta check this out. And
Speaker 2: you know, us driving through the Deep South and listening
Speaker 2: to far right radio kind of was like, Okay, we
Speaker 2: get why he did that, We get why that was necessary.
Speaker 2: So take us on that journey with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, brother Blah, I was there. Came years later, but
Speaker 3: what I ended up doing was so one of the
Speaker 3: There was this meme that kept coming up, and it
Speaker 3: was a meme of a Civil War battlefield. It was
Speaker 3: a picture in an old black and white Seputone photograph
Speaker 3: that says six hundred thousand white men died to free
Speaker 3: you from slavery.
Speaker 1: You welcome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'm like, I did battle with the person
Speaker 3: who posted that meme for the longest time, bro. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I realized that I wasn't going to get anywhere
Speaker 3: because I didn't understand the root from which that leaf
Speaker 3: had fallen from. And so around this time, I worked
Speaker 3: at a call center and for whatever reason, the firewalls
Speaker 3: at the call center would block out a lot of websites.
Speaker 3: And you know, you know, Vanguard Alliance was one of them.
Speaker 3: American Renaissance at the time was one of them. But
Speaker 3: they all had YouTube channels, and so I literally just
Speaker 3: went in and I'm telling you, it didn't it didn't
Speaker 3: take long. When I tell you, I thought this was useless.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 3: What I didn't realize is that YouTube is a portal
Speaker 3: to the dark web. There's a lot of things that
Speaker 3: go on on YouTube that will actually pull you down
Speaker 3: the rabbit hole to the actual dark web. There's a
Speaker 3: dark YouTube. There's all of that, right, So, just by
Speaker 3: the fact that the algorithm kept feeding me things, I
Speaker 3: felt more down them. And then at the time was
Speaker 3: eight chan. It was a four chance and there was
Speaker 3: some stuff that I set up on there, but mostly
Speaker 3: I couldn't do that at work. I couldn't do that
Speaker 3: at work. Maybe a little on my phone, but the
Speaker 3: fact was is that at work was where a lot
Speaker 3: of this was done. And also at work, it was
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen. I remember when the shooting in the church happened, right,
Speaker 3: it was twenty fifteen, where a lot of talking about
Speaker 3: Dylan Ruth. Yeah, Dylan Ruth. Right, I just joined that job.
Speaker 3: That incident specifically had me triggered as hell. And I'll
Speaker 3: call it trigger because I it hit a trigger. I
Speaker 3: am a police brutality survivor, so here I am. I
Speaker 3: have this account. I see what's being said. I'm triggered
Speaker 3: as hell with the nicest white folks in the world
Speaker 3: working around. I'm telling you, the nicest white folks who
Speaker 3: ever want to meet why? And so I'm navigating some
Speaker 3: mental health things at this time, But I'm also just
Speaker 3: out going viral. So I'm getting things from both sides.
Speaker 3: And as I am going viral on my Facebook page
Speaker 3: because that that video I made about dinner roof got
Speaker 3: about one hundred thousand views on Facebook, I'm taking literal
Speaker 3: cutting paste from what's being said to me. About the Confederacy,
Speaker 3: about you know, on white supremacy, and I'm saying it
Speaker 3: as my avatar Lucia's twenty five, and I'm just watching
Speaker 3: it get applauded. I'm watching it get lauded and hand
Speaker 3: clapped and all that stuff. My profile picture was John Carter,
Speaker 3: who was a Confederate soldier in the old John Carter
Speaker 3: of Mars novels right, and Marvel picked it up, and
Speaker 3: the image that I got was from Marvel. But the
Speaker 3: bottom line was that was one of the most inciting incidents.
Speaker 3: And I remember not realizing that I was slipping into
Speaker 3: darkness and I lost two relationships because of the head
Speaker 3: trauma that I got out of that. I didn't mention that,
Speaker 3: and I did end up in therapy over that. But
Speaker 3: it was all about me figuring out an existential threat.
Speaker 3: The talk was about compassion. I was there for reconnaissance.
Speaker 1: So I do want to circle back to the show
Speaker 1: I was there, and I want to get your thoughts
Speaker 1: on critical race theory. And I do want to also
Speaker 1: because I know this term that you use. It's called
Speaker 1: decolonizing the narrative, and I love the eloquence of that term.
Speaker 1: So I want you to break that down for us
Speaker 1: as well as I have. There's so much that we
Speaker 1: need to talk about. Man, this is a fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1: But for now, let us take a pause for the cause.
Speaker 1: I need you to stick around because obviously we have
Speaker 1: a lot more in store.