Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to Okay EFFI daily with
Speaker 1: me your girl Danielle Moody, recording back live from our
Speaker 1: pun Stream studios here in Times Square. Dear friends, what
Speaker 1: a goddamn week it has been. I want to believe
Speaker 1: that there is still time. I want to believe that
Speaker 1: the collection of Democrats who recognize the urgency of this
Speaker 1: moment are going to act that they are not going
Speaker 1: to let this historic time pass us by and be
Speaker 1: left with a bunch of what ifs. But if you
Speaker 1: are watching the infrastructure bill fight play out right now,
Speaker 1: you are not feeling hopeful. You are actually probably feeling aggravated,
Speaker 1: anxiety induced, rage filled at the fact that you have
Speaker 1: two supposed Democrats who are willing to extinguish our democracy
Speaker 1: for their own ends. So again, when we direct all
Speaker 1: of our hope, right when we direct all of our
Speaker 1: hope on oh, I don't know, two fucking people, or
Speaker 1: the hope that they're going to be more Francises in
Speaker 1: the world or more Fiona Hills in the world, and
Speaker 1: we realize that they are not, that that this country
Speaker 1: is actually made up of a bunch of cinemas and mansions,
Speaker 1: people that don't really give a fuck. They only care
Speaker 1: about their own town, their own life, their own family,
Speaker 1: and be damned everyone else you even had This week
Speaker 1: Joe Biden mentioning there are two people that are holding
Speaker 1: up my agenda, but doesn't have the balls to say
Speaker 1: who the fuck those two people are being? Is how
Speaker 1: we all know who they are that doesn't have the
Speaker 1: balls to take it to them to the fucking street
Speaker 1: and say, you know what, here's the thing, American people,
Speaker 1: I am doing everything within my goddamn power in order
Speaker 1: to try and make sure that another six hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand Americans don't die from COVID, and I'm sorry
Speaker 1: we are now at over seven hundred thousand that I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do my best to make sure that more
Speaker 1: people don't lose their jobs, that you have clean drinking water,
Speaker 1: that we can build up infrastructure to fight our twenty
Speaker 1: first century climate change problem, right the crises that we
Speaker 1: are in. And I could do all of these things,
Speaker 1: you see, because I have great policy ideas and I
Speaker 1: have good people working with me. But I have two
Speaker 1: people that refuse. And so, dear fellow American, do you
Speaker 1: know what I need? I need you to pick up
Speaker 1: the fucking phone. I need you to inundate their offices.
Speaker 1: I need you to do sit ins, I need you
Speaker 1: to do march is. I need you to make calls,
Speaker 1: and I need you to defund these two fucking senators
Speaker 1: because they are the ones that are standing between you
Speaker 1: and your livelihood, between you and our democracy. Because let
Speaker 1: me tell you something, we are running out of time
Speaker 1: for Joe Biden to play the fucking comforter in chief.
Speaker 1: And I am frankly don't need a comforter anymore. I
Speaker 1: will say it again. I need a fucking commander. I
Speaker 1: need a warrior. I need somebody that knows that we
Speaker 1: don't have any time left and need to leave everything
Speaker 1: on the fucking floor. Right, But Joe Biden still believes
Speaker 1: that he's operating with twentieth century senators. He still believes
Speaker 1: that Mitch McConnell gon spit in his face but then
Speaker 1: want to grab a scotch with him later and that
Speaker 1: will hash it out as the way we do in
Speaker 1: the deliberative body. Dear Joe Biden, the Senate is dead.
Speaker 1: Collaboration is dead, right. I don't know what else it
Speaker 1: is that Mitch McConnell literally has to say other than
Speaker 1: what he already said, which is that his one job,
Speaker 1: his job is not to make sure that the American
Speaker 1: people are okay. His job is not to make sure
Speaker 1: that America stays competitive on the global stage. No, his
Speaker 1: one job is to make sure that you are a
Speaker 1: one term president. Ding ding ding. Where the fuck did
Speaker 1: we hear that before? So here's the thing. We keep
Speaker 1: betting on everyone's better angels. And the question that I
Speaker 1: am offering is what if they have none? Right? I
Speaker 1: know that I say this often, but I gotta tell
Speaker 1: you this week not making me feel great, kind of
Speaker 1: making me feel like. You know, we are already living
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four and big Brother is everywhere. All
Speaker 1: I can say is, you know, at least China is
Speaker 1: transparent about their shit. And by transparent, I mean that
Speaker 1: they are all about social control right and beating back
Speaker 1: any type of resistance. In America, we say that you're
Speaker 1: We're all about freedom, except we've sold your data to
Speaker 1: the highest bidder. We're all about freedom, except we're using
Speaker 1: your information against you for capitalistic gains. And then we
Speaker 1: won't regulate shit, because then that would be taking money
Speaker 1: out of our own coffers. I don't think Wu Tang
Speaker 1: knew how prolific they were when they said that cash
Speaker 1: rules everything around me. But dear fucking god, they really were.
Speaker 1: Coming up next is my conversation with the brilliant writer
Speaker 1: from The New Yorker and the voice one of the
Speaker 1: voices behind the new book Black Lives Matter is Gilanni Cobb.
Speaker 1: So stay tuned for that conversation, folks. I am very
Speaker 1: excited to have our second you, Gilani Cobb, are our
Speaker 1: second in studio guest um for wok app Daily. I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to beat me up the MSNBC host Yasmin
Speaker 1: Masougi and beat you out. So I mean something like
Speaker 1: the silver medalist. You are a silver but still on
Speaker 1: the podium. Yeah, but you know they always say like
Speaker 1: the bronze medalist is happier than the civil the silver
Speaker 1: medal because the silver is the runner up. Bronze medalist
Speaker 1: is happy to be getting a medal, but the silver
Speaker 1: medalist is like, what could I have done? And so
Speaker 1: it's the situation where I was like, I lost by
Speaker 1: a fraction of a second. Could I have gotten you here?
Speaker 1: If I had enticed you with the fact that you
Speaker 1: would have been the first sure you have come quicker. Absolutely, Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, definitely that was my That was my I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, standing here with the silver medal, with the
Speaker 1: silver medal, but you're still on woke app so that
Speaker 1: in and of itself is winning and makes you a champion.
Speaker 1: Gilanni Cobb, you are a staff writer with The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: You have put together edited one of the most dance
Speaker 1: books I think that cover black life in America, The
Speaker 1: Matter of black Lives. You put this together. He I
Speaker 1: don't even know how you were working in the midst
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty. Me. I needed to be partly catatonic
Speaker 1: for half of it, and then, you know, then started
Speaker 1: to kind of get the win back in my sales.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk to you about did you
Speaker 1: think the weeks the months following the murder of George
Speaker 1: Floyd that we had reached some type of reckoning because
Speaker 1: we were all collectively indoors, right, we were all on
Speaker 1: our devices, staring at the TV, just waiting for whatever
Speaker 1: bit of news about the future of our lives, of
Speaker 1: our planet as it was being enveloped in this virus,
Speaker 1: and then recognizing the multiple pandemics that we are actually
Speaker 1: living in Did you think that it was going to
Speaker 1: be a reckoning or was it just going to be
Speaker 1: one of the many? So I was at a disadvantage
Speaker 1: in understanding the significance of George Floyd. And the reason
Speaker 1: I was at a disadvantage was the fact that I
Speaker 1: had written about when I was in my twenties, I
Speaker 1: had written about Amadudiallo and Abner Louima, you know, who
Speaker 1: were respectively shot and sexually abused by in my PD offices,
Speaker 1: and the kind of tortured path it took to get
Speaker 1: any semblance of justice those situations. Of course, it was
Speaker 1: you're Rodney King. Before that I wasn't really writing. But
Speaker 1: in my thirties, you know, I had written about all
Speaker 1: of these instances of police excessive use of force. In
Speaker 1: my forties, had written about, you know, all these concerns.
Speaker 1: And here I was as a fifty one year old person,
Speaker 1: and I had seen overwhelmingly the same outcome of the
Speaker 1: administration or the bureaucracy circling ranks and finding a way
Speaker 1: to exonerate the person who had committed and agree just wrong.
Speaker 1: And so I thought, when I looked at the video,
Speaker 1: I said, this is horrific. Is in humane, is disgusting.
Speaker 1: They'll find a way to get to get this guy off.
Speaker 1: And what I underestimated was, well, I undersubmitated two things.
Speaker 1: The first was the impact of everyone at home. There
Speaker 1: was nothing to distract your people didn't have to go
Speaker 1: to work, you know, and so they could just stew
Speaker 1: in these visuals and what the inhumanity of it meant.
Speaker 1: And the second thing was the excruciating length of that video,
Speaker 1: which I still never watched. I attempted to watch it
Speaker 1: when we did a documentary on policing, and you know,
Speaker 1: as part of the documentary, I sat down and said
Speaker 1: I should watch this video, and you know, I got
Speaker 1: to like maybe the four minute mark, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I need to stop this. But for people who sat
Speaker 1: there and watched and like, do how long it takes anything?
Speaker 1: For eight minutes and forty six seconds, you know, that
Speaker 1: is commitment. And this person kneeled a minute after minute
Speaker 1: after minute after minute in service of the cause of
Speaker 1: extinguishing George Floyd's like And I think that people weren't
Speaker 1: prepared to see that kind of casual sadism on display
Speaker 1: because it's different. I mean, it's all tortuous and disgusting.
Speaker 1: But it's different with a bullet, right, because there's a there,
Speaker 1: there is a distance right that is between it, and
Speaker 1: it's generally generally quicker. Right, this was right, and he
Speaker 1: could say, oh, I feared from her, I feared from
Speaker 1: my life. Right is the common refrain because it's so quick,
Speaker 1: and you know, cops have to act so quickly under pressure,
Speaker 1: is what they tell us time and time again. But
Speaker 1: this wasn't that. And I think that I foolishly believed
Speaker 1: that this was going to be a reckoning moment because
Speaker 1: I said, there's no way that you watch this for
Speaker 1: that long. And but but at the same time, I
Speaker 1: did also say, well, they're going to hang this on
Speaker 1: this one bad apple, which is what they say every
Speaker 1: single time on woke AF. I say, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: bad apple from a poisonous orchard that had spanned the
Speaker 1: length of this country. What are we what are you
Speaker 1: talking about? But as long as we can convince people
Speaker 1: that if we get rid of this one, there are
Speaker 1: so many good ones, right, which is which is what
Speaker 1: happened in the Derek Chauvin trial. You know, I covered
Speaker 1: the trial and when you saw the police chief Madaria
Speaker 1: Rodondo come out and denounce Chauvin's actions. You saw the
Speaker 1: various members of the police department come out, you saw
Speaker 1: police voices from across the country denouncing what he had done.
Speaker 1: And I said, you know, we're being good copped, you know,
Speaker 1: because in order to highlight the idea that the police
Speaker 1: are fundamentally good and benign, we need to distinguish ourselves
Speaker 1: from this person, to say he's not one of us,
Speaker 1: he's not like us. But the problem is that he
Speaker 1: had been on the Minneapolis Police Force for I think
Speaker 1: it was nineteen years, that he had been in a
Speaker 1: supervisory capacity, that he had been training younger officers in
Speaker 1: the ways of the department, and he had been promoted.
Speaker 1: And so by what metric was this man not one
Speaker 1: of you? And so of course he was one of them.
Speaker 1: He represented them in their values and as demonstrated by
Speaker 1: their continued employment of him and their promotions of him.
Speaker 1: And so it was really a kind of illusion that
Speaker 1: thought we were being sold. And the point of it
Speaker 1: was so that we could get back to the business
Speaker 1: as usual set of presumptions that if there is this person,
Speaker 1: especially if it's a person of color, who dies in
Speaker 1: the course of an interact, with the police. They had
Speaker 1: it coming. This your book, The Matter of Black Lives,
Speaker 1: with this deep anthology, all of these stories, this analysis,
Speaker 1: How how or do you hold on to any semblance
Speaker 1: that America isn't destined for just implosion more of the same. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I will tell you that one of the things
Speaker 1: that gets me every time that I read you know,
Speaker 1: your writing, uh and others, Charles Blow other other folks.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it just never gets any better, right, And
Speaker 1: so how you know, how do you hang on to
Speaker 1: any like that that we're not just going to implode,
Speaker 1: that we're just not headed towards destruction. It's interesting, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in this collection, we have this really dazzling
Speaker 1: array of people, you know, thinking about these questions and
Speaker 1: how they pertain um and not necessarily you know, expressly
Speaker 1: or explicitly. Sometimes it's as a subtext, you know. But
Speaker 1: we have you know, Tony Morrison's writing in here, Hilton Owl's,
Speaker 1: Zadie Smith, Henry Lewis Gates during Saint Felix, my current
Speaker 1: colleague at The New Yorker, Khalif Asana, you know, a
Speaker 1: whole I hate when I started mentioning people because then
Speaker 1: you leave people out the people starting upset about it,
Speaker 1: But there's really so much, such a breath of work
Speaker 1: in there that I really think it's a kind of
Speaker 1: profound set of meditations about individuals, about events, about places,
Speaker 1: about people, and so on. And maybe the net effect
Speaker 1: of that is to have a broader perspective on whether
Speaker 1: or not there's hope, whether or not there's the possibility
Speaker 1: of change. You know, as I wrote in the introduction,
Speaker 1: I said that the anthology is not about race. It's
Speaker 1: about the people who are most commonly tasked with confronting it,
Speaker 1: you know, because race affects the entire society, but it
Speaker 1: is typically black people who expect it to confront and
Speaker 1: wrestle with, you know, this demon and try to drag
Speaker 1: it out of the public square. And so that's what
Speaker 1: we were trying to get at, you know, to your
Speaker 1: specific question about about implosion, I actually don't view it
Speaker 1: that way. I think that there is change, but it's
Speaker 1: just that that change is fragile, is contested that you
Speaker 1: have to protect it, you have to hold onto it.
Speaker 1: But you know, when we start looking at our political representation,
Speaker 1: even as the people are trying to throw impediments, you know,
Speaker 1: between us and the ballot box. Now, you know, in
Speaker 1: some ways, we're looking at this from a different vantage
Speaker 1: point because you know, we have a congressional Black caucus,
Speaker 1: we have black elected officials and cities across the country
Speaker 1: on the municipal level. You know, on the state level,
Speaker 1: that black people have a level of political power an
Speaker 1: authority which is far and away different from what we
Speaker 1: looked at in nineteen sixty five, which is to say
Speaker 1: that what John Lewis was getting hit over the head
Speaker 1: for worked. You know, it wasn't a cure. It was
Speaker 1: a treatment, but it was a treatment that had results,
Speaker 1: and so I think that we have to have an assessment.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I think it's important is that
Speaker 1: you know, when I have this conversation, which I have
Speaker 1: quite frequently with my students, I always direct them at
Speaker 1: to the last message that w Eb Dwo Boys released
Speaker 1: the world, or rather the message that was released upon
Speaker 1: his death, and as background, the Boys, when he was
Speaker 1: twenty five years old, said that he would devote his
Speaker 1: life to slaying white supremacy, that he would fight against
Speaker 1: white supremacy on behalf of black people. That was what
Speaker 1: he wanted to dedicate his life too. He was twenty
Speaker 1: five years old. He did that until he was ninety
Speaker 1: five years old. He was still fighting when he died.
Speaker 1: Seven decades of his life, seven decades he pursued this mission.
Speaker 1: And when he died, he left a message saying for
Speaker 1: people coming after him to not despair because our struggles
Speaker 1: along and because the roads are difficult, you know, but
Speaker 1: always humanity reaches a higher level, he said. And so
Speaker 1: I don't have the vantage point of seventy years of struggle.
Speaker 1: So I don't really have the right to be pessimistic
Speaker 1: day that I see it now making me feel like
Speaker 1: I don't have the right to be that. I based
Speaker 1: my lave this journey. Um. Now the last question, the
Speaker 1: last question for you. Um. You know, the past eighteen
Speaker 1: months have been one of the most trying times in
Speaker 1: our country, on our planet, and in our world. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious, you know, on woke AF I talk a lot,
Speaker 1: obviously about politics, and talk a lot about race and identity, UM,
Speaker 1: but I'm also moving into a place of talking about
Speaker 1: what it means to live whole and to live full
Speaker 1: and to center joy, especially in the face of persistent despair.
Speaker 1: So how do you keep yourself centered in some type
Speaker 1: of joy. How do you keep your light about you
Speaker 1: in the face of darkness? You know, it's funny because
Speaker 1: I mean very small thing things, you know. So if
Speaker 1: I think about what made me really happy today, I
Speaker 1: woke up at four fifty nine this morning, and I
Speaker 1: got up and before I did anything, you know, started anything,
Speaker 1: I just sat down in the dark quiet, and that
Speaker 1: was it. You know, that was the thing that made
Speaker 1: me happiest in that day. And then, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that for me looking at the younger people who
Speaker 1: were coming up now and coming into their own and
Speaker 1: even you know, the children that were coming included mind,
Speaker 1: you know that that, you know, those are things that
Speaker 1: make me happy. I went out and bought myself a
Speaker 1: new suit last week, which is you know, I love clothes,
Speaker 1: and one point, buying a new suit would have really
Speaker 1: like been a thing like, oh wow, this suit, we
Speaker 1: haven't gonna wear it, and it's and so forth. And
Speaker 1: it was okay. I mean I liked it. I mean
Speaker 1: I still like suits. But you know, the thing that
Speaker 1: really made me happy is thinking about playing a role
Speaker 1: in the development of these younger people who are coming
Speaker 1: after me. I love that. Joanni Cobb, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: For making time, folks. The book is the matter of
Speaker 1: black lives. I implore you all to pick it up
Speaker 1: because we're going to be going through it on the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you so much. That's it for Today's Woke,
Speaker 1: a f daily podcast. To hear more from today's show,
Speaker 1: including my full interview with Jilanni Cobb, support me on
Speaker 1: Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Woke a power to
Speaker 1: the people and to all the people power, get woke
Speaker 1: and stay woke as fuck.