Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - Super Bowl LVII and Dr. Peniel Joseph on Chauvinism in the Civil Rights Movement

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Van and Rachel discuss Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime performance and other happenings around the big game (15:47). Then, Dr. Peniel Joseph is back to discuss the role of Black women throughout the fight for civil rights (42:33) and give a book recommendation (1:23:28). Plus, the government gets cagey about the shooting down of UFOs (1:26:37). Hosts: Van Lathan Jr. and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Dr. Peniel E. Joseph Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, yo, y'all about Warners. What is up? How I Learning is on is I, Van Lake, Jr. And it's me, Rachel and Lindsay. We hung out yesterday. We did. Super Bowl. Yeah.

We did. Nice simple party. Like a little Super Bowl situation. Yeah, went over there. Super Bowl. We'll talk about the Super Bowl a little bit later. But I was over there and I want to say one thing. I want to say pre-competers.

copper. Okay, copper was fine. He did not have the muzzle on. We didn't do that. He was out here with all the other dogs. What are you talking about? We're going to talk about the Super Bowl and all the things that happened around it later. But what I say free copper is like, this is what I want to see for copper. Okay, tell me. I walk in, copper barks at me. I know he's going to bark because it's his house. You know what I mean? It's his house, man. It's his house, man. It's his house. You guys are like, no, copper, copper, no, no, copper, no. And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, like, you know, Van. Of course he knows me.

He knows me by scent. He knew me before I even hit the door. What I want is the next time I come over, just I want no, I want nothing said towards copper. Like, it's not on my account. Not on my account. If you guys want to raise your kid, raise your kid out of you want. But if copper nips me, if copper nips me, if copper.

Hopper barks at me, that's copper's crib. I keep telling y'all, don't weigh him down with all these expectations because I'm there. Don't do it on my account. I've seen him. I've seen me open the door and him literally charge at people. You have to let me say, hold him, and then let me say, okay, acknowledge him. And then you touch him. that prevents a charge or a bite.

So this is my thing. I know my child. This is my thing. Let him get it off. You come into his house. Coppers been through so much. You know what I'm talking about? Like he was a street dog.

He was. You think that he wants somebody coming in off the streets, try to take what he got. And by the way, no one plays with Bowesman better than Cobb. Bozeman cannot control himself. It's just not going to happen. Bozeman's up, like knocking shit over. Brian's like, just looking around like what's going on.

Brozman's knocking shit over everywhere. And Coppers is like, let me chill, this big crazy thing. You know, he looks at Bozman like a child. It's like, sit down, son. They play well together as cousins. They do. They play well together. They do.

Browning, on the other hand, got at Bozeman. He scared Bozeman. Yeah, Bozeman, Bozeman's not here for the, for the, for the conflict. It's a burden of it. I mean, both was not here for the conflict. Bozman's here to like have a good time, you know. Yeah, Brownie wouldn't have, his little monster. Brownie is, Brownie's brave, you know.

Brownie's brave. Y'all, there was a, there was a moment during the watch party where I caught Van just staring at Brownie. He got lost in Brownie. I watched you for a good 45. seconds, you were just staring at Brownie. And then you go, Ronnie's really cute. I was like, what is Ronnie?

Ronnie's a cute dog. Ronnie's a little cute dog. Ronnie's got a little personality. Brownie's a cute puppy. I like dogs. Okay? I love dogs. I love Brody.

So yesterday was your first day back in L.A. because you went to the Super Bowl situation. How was it? It was great. I had so much fun. My voice, it's not even that bad. You know, you know how my voice can get. But it was a good weekend.

Hit the dinners, hit the parties, did a little networking, did one thing work-wise. I was in and out. A lot of people say, why don't you stay for the Super Bowl? I think that's kind of the deal with me and Brian, because this is a tradition for me to go, because I met Katie at Super Bowl, so we always hang out together.

I go out, have a good time. But the deal is I come back and I watch the Super Bowl every year with Brian. I don't stay. Because Brian would be, fill a certain way if he didn't get to go to the Super Bowl. And I get that. He don't want to do all the other stuff. So I come home and we watch it together

every year. So no matter, because see, this year is easy because the Super Bowl was in Arizona. It's like an hour flight. But like let's say the Super Bowl would have been in Miami. So then you would have gone to all of this stuff and then flown out.

I actually did do that. So we lived in Miami when the Super Bowl was in Miami. But Brian came to most of the stuff with me. We went together to all the parties. And the day of the Super Bowl, I flew back. I actually left Brian that time because I had to work or something. I was still freelancing in L.A. And there was something I had to do in L.A.

So I left and I still caught the Super Bowl. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Maybe I made it at halftime. Whatever it was, I saw it. I saw Shakira and J-Lo. I think I only missed the first quarter.

Shakira, Shakira. I love the big of the time, thank you. Look, look. I like different songs. You know what I like? I like the Lady Gaga era. You know? So her era is over?

Yeah, like the way I'm talking about. I'm talking about Alejandro, poker face. You know what I mean? Everybody named their favorite Lady Gaga song. What's your favorite lady Gaga song? favorite Lady Gaga song. I really like you and I. I don't know that song.

Okay. I don't know it. The telephone song? That's a good phone. That's a good. She has telephone and she has, I think Beyonce has like video phone. Two different phones.

And I think I like Alejandro. I just love that song. Really? Yeah, I don't know why. Donnie, what's your favorite Lady Gaga song? Lady Gaga's song. Lady Gaga's era was epic. Yeah, agree.

Mine is poker face. But it's a specific one. The one where she's, I like the regular one, but I like one where she's playing on the piano. And it's like an MTV clip version. Yeah, like she plays it staccato. I don't think I know what you're talking about at the beginning.

Yeah, it's really good. Exactly. Ashley, what about yours? I like Mary the Night. Like she, I think God somebody shows a different song. I mean, they're over here. named her top three. I was like, please.

Somebody take a different song. Yeah, it was like a big, like music video on MTV, like, during like the MTV Video Awards a long time ago. And it was like 12 minutes long and it was like a big thing. It was great. Yeah. She's dope. I remember when they took,

when they took poker face and they made it into that song with Kanye, you know that song with Kanye? Oh, my kid Cuddy. Yeah. My fucker face. I'd never heard of taking a song that new. old enough. Think about that.

How old is that old enough? Like now, born in 88, you old. Like, a lot of time is fast. You know what I mean? I love that song. Donnie, did you watch the Super Bowl yesterday? I did. I did.

It was entertaining until the end. You didn't like it at the end. You know, like from the reps. It fizzled out, yeah. The refus make accurate calls, you know. Enjoy that. Wait, everybody. Everybody.

Who thinks the call was fair? So it's an accurate call. There's no doubt about it. No, not holding. His hand was just there. Okay, see, Donison's home. So can I be honest with you guys? Well, you know, the player said,

the player admitted, Donnie, that he held him. The guy said that he helped. He said, he said, it's an accurate call. But the question becomes, do you, do they normally call that? Because sometimes they let them go. I guess that's dependent on the ref. Some refs let it go.

Some refs don't. That's fine. All of the matters to me is that it's, ruling fraction. Because I tell you one thing is that if they don't call it, and then it's like, oh, he was grabbing his jersey. Then after the game, he said, I grabbed his jersey. Is it a shitty way for the game to hand?

Sure, it is. Unless the Chiefs won. If they didn't call it and the Chiefs still won, nobody would talk about it. I'm going to get to the Super Bowl in a second. I have to say something real. Number one, we have, what? I'm saying, we have Piniel Joseph coming up. we give you guys 40 minutes of Penil Joseph.

And we talk about everything. We talk about women's places and civil rights. We talk about DEI in Texas and them trying to do away with it. We give you a black history month check-in with one of the smartest men in all of America, Penil Joseph. Yes, good conversation. Before we get to anything, we have to talk about something. We lost an absolute legend.

Tregor de Duff. We're on the founding members of De La So. He died Sunday at 15th. The cause of death has not been revealed. They have been open about his diagnosis of congestive heart failure. For a lot of you younger kids, you might not understand the importance of de la so. But there was this brilliant, amazing, beautiful time. And maybe he still exists and I'm too out of the loop to know.

when rap was this fabric interwoven with all of these different threads where there were gangsters from the west where they were slick talking niggas from the south where they were purists from the east but there were also there's also this brilliant amazing jazzy Afrocentric, offbeat, off-kilter group of guys called the Native Tom family. Native Tom family, Tri-Corp Quest, Jungle Brothers,

De La Sol, all of them, making some of the most introspective, brave, beautiful, poetic, and enduring hip-hop music ever. And that's what De La Sol represents. De LaSoul represents just a purity and a sincerity of artistic expression that you rarely see in any sort of musical genre. And they did it and they became legends for it. And this is the important reason why we have to make sure that we treat our pioneers and our legends and our buildings.

blocks our foundation in a certain way. For those of you who don't know, De La Los Angeles Music for a long time due to contract disputes and other sort of red tape musical issues was not available on streaming services. It's now about to become available. So there's going to be an entire generation of people who are going to be

reacquainted and for the first time acquainted with the brilliance of De La Sol. And this brother, who was only 54 years old, didn't get a chance to see that. He got a chance to see all kinds of other things. But the people that know that care, they were celebrated the way that they were supposed to. But when we're talking about the people

that made a way, that plowed away for hip-hop to be what it is right now, the reason why it's important to care about them is because you want brothers like this to be able to smell those flowers. And all of the time that is wasted in these seemingly intractable disputes where they're fighting for the artistic lives and the right to monetize the genius

that they put out there, it's wasted time. And we don't know how long they're going to be with us. We just have no clue how long they're going to be with us. So it was doubly gutting to me that this happened just before there was going to be a resurgence and a renaissance of de la soul. I grew up on, and I grew up on the first incarnation of De Nights when he was a rapper.

I grew up on BDP. I grew up on guys like Kwame, Redhead Kingpan, you know what I mean, Chub Rock, all of these other guys that you can consider to be the dudes in hip-hop that were, you know, leaders of the new school, all of those guys. I grew up on all of this type of rock, obviously the tribe called quest, all of these guys, right? Those guys are important, man. They matter. They're like really, really integral to everything that was going on.

They changed it up. They flow different. They dress different. For a kid like myself who wasn't slanging no keys or getting no money off the street, it had no holes on a stroll, it mattered. It was important to me. It was fucking important to me. So I hope that everyone understands the genius of De La Sol.

My heart goes out to the surviving group members. My heart goes out to everybody in hip hop that's been affected by this. But just like Dilla, you know what I mean? Just like countless others, this one was one that really hurt. It did really, it really, really hurt. Yeah, I mean, I'm not really going to add too much to that because what you just said is beautiful. And you're obviously way more acquainted with De La Solis.

music than I am. I did just interview pause though and he was at he performed at the at the what was it the Grammys he performed at the Grammys in the hip hop in the hip hop celebration so if you haven't already

that's something that put them back out too because he was out there representing for de la soul but yeah I'm not as familiar so what you said was beautiful and that it I'll say this for people who

consume hip-hop. I think what highlights even more of what you just said is that you look at it, and I'm throwing myself in this, you look at it for what it is right now and not necessarily the originators of it. You know, I'm familiar with names. I'm familiar with certain songs, but not necessarily the history, not necessarily the struggle of the music and the artistry of it. So I think what you said is so encouraging for people who do consume it to understand it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, you're right. All right. I'm going to take a break. One of the side of this. We're going to come back.

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Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Trimfair radio.com. Okay, Rachel, your thoughts on the Super Bowl? I thought it was a great Super Bowl. People like myself who don't have an allegiance to either team just wanted to see a good game and a good halftime performance, which we'll talk about later. that's all I wanted this was especially the first half it was an exciting

game there was the the offense was killing it it was a back and forth back and forth I was personally rooting for Jalen Hurts so it was really great to see him do his thing he fumble you said what

he fumble cost him the game it was really great to see him do his thing his fumble did not cost him the game the rest missing the call I'm just kidding I mean Jaylor Hurts played a fantastic game. Exactly.

Any set of record. A historic game. Okay. Stop and stop being negative. You asking me my thoughts. He's about that bitch. I know. You didn't hear me say?

No, it was the refs for, I'm joking. Anyways, I enjoyed this game, enjoyed watching it. It was everything that I wanted it to be. And it was great to see two black quarterbacks thrive on football's biggest stage. I enjoyed it. I was entertained. It's what I wanted to see, even though it's not necessarily the outcome

that I wanted at the end of the day. What did you think? I thought a couple of things. I thought, number one, I couldn't help him feel a little bit like an old Uncle Tom in watching the game. Oh. Yeah.

Colin Kaepernick-Degger-A-R-Green. You watch football. Not really. I'll be honest with you. I don't really watch. Look, I watch too much of it. I shouldn't be watching as much as much for it. I just want everybody to know.

We're all talking about the football. We're all complicit in one of the greatest misjustices in American sports history. It's just a fact. Okay. Don't go down to Colin Kaepernick. I'm not going to go. What do you mean? It's not Colin Kaepernick shooting star as a comment.

I just want everybody to know this. This is why I want everybody to know. Everybody had a great time. we poured hundreds of millions of dollars of commerce. I did it as well. We all did it. We all had a great time. There's a cost.

That's all I want people to know. There's a cost. And for black people, especially, we got to remember there's a cost. That's all. Okay, so I have to say that. I have to say that. So are we watching it together next year?

Next year? So I'm going to be honest with you. I'm working I'm working my ass off right now to try to change the fate of Colin Kaepernick and doing everything that I can do at some point I'm going to have to punt on the NFL it's going to be hard but at some point I'm going to have to punt on the NFL

between that you can't play the game either what game madden? Yeah you can't play the game either I can't play any man no that's football I don't know that contributes Can I tell you something, though?

Aha, just in time. You know what they have coming back out? NCAA football game. They have that coming out. And I love that just as much. Great. I can make the turn to, but I'll be real with you, man.

It's going to be hard to give up on some bad. But we'll see. Because I use Madden to cope with life. We'll find a new sport. Don't talk to me like this, Rachel. I'm just trying to hold you. I'm just trying to hold you to your word. And look, and I'm trying to.

and I need to be, they got Deshawn Watson in the league. They got Deshawn Watson in the league. 60 women nutted on them all. However, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reed just for standing up for black people can't be in the league.

Deshawn Watson legit crazy. I'm sorry. I don't know what you're saying. The niggas nuts. I hope that it's wild that he got to come back this season. That's wild to me. 3835. you know, Donnie put the game box score down here.

I don't know why we would, we're not going to go to. He did. I put a link to it just in case you wanted to. Thank you for being, thank you for being thorough, Donnie. Thank you. Let's get to what people were talking about. Rihanna's halftime performance is what we're talking about. Some people were mad at Riri because Riri was a staunch supporter of the movement back

when it was very fashionable, we'll be a start supporter. Things have changed. And now Riri is doing a half. halftime show. Whatever, Rihanna can do no wrong. I love her. However, we should all be concerned. We should just know.

It should be top of my. What do you think about the halftime performance, Rachel? I thought it was great. Okay? Okay. I really thought it was great. I was excited to see Rihanna on stage. Yeah.

She could have stood there with the microphone, not moved, moved her head. And I would have been excited just to see her in all her glory on at the halftime show being Rihanna. That's it. So for me,

you know, we watched it in a room full of people, full of people. It was me, Van, Kleeke, and Brian. And the dogs. And I would say about 10 seconds saying we all kind of started to look at each other. Like who wants to be the first one to say it?

Who wants to be the first one to ask the question? We immediately started, asking ourselves is Rihanna pregnant? Y'all started asking. I didn't ask. What was the first thing I said? I said, I do not believe that it is fair to ever speculate that. Because you were looking on Twitter and you were like, Twitter is going off. I was going on, I'm like, I pray to God she is.

I was looking at what people were saying. Yeah, I know about the Haptime show. I will never forget Joe Knox, who was my cousin's dad, my grandmother's sister's husband, one day saw my mom in the grocery store and asked my mother if she was with child when my mother was not pregnant. And my mom was pissed and hurt. I never speculate on whether or not a lady's pregnant or not.

You know what I mean? More people need to follow suit. I was not so it was like, y'all, she could, she could not be. So I just didn't, I just couldn't believe how everybody was talking about it without knowing. And because it's not like we've seen Rihanna that much in the public eye. We're seeing her a lot to speak because we knew she was performing. She's been doing press for it.

But she's also been very covered up. If you look, she's been very covered up. Anyways, I was shocked. And I said, I pray she's pregnant because I cannot imagine. And Rihanna doesn't seem to be bothered by anything. But I would have hated for people to be speculating in that way. And she wasn't. But she is.

And it's been confirmed. And that's beautiful. And I think that's great. And I think that adds to. how historic, or that it was historic. It's the first time that any half-time performer has performed while they were carrying a child while they were pregnant. I think that made it even better.

It was beautiful that that was her, that she gave it to us in a very subtle way. She wasn't out loud with it. You know, she didn't drop a microphone at the end of her performance and then reveal. Wow. I'm kidding. I actually like love.

when she did that. I'm kidding. I'm just messing with y'all because y'all get so mad at me. Y'all get so mad at me. I'm kidding. I actually loved when Beyonce did that with love on top. I love that performance. Tell you. No. I'm putting it on the gram. Every time you come to y'all's saying.

Don't clip me out though when I say I'm kidding. Don't clip me out. Anyways, I love that she did it in a subtle way. And it was genius to me because it had everybody talking. The game had started and we were still trying to figure out if Rihanna was with child. It was a genius moment. She had a vibe.

I think a lot of people want her to be over the top. Rihanna is a vibe. There is an energy about Rihanna. And she was given us all of that in the performance. I loved it. The performance itself, to me, went from being a performance that was sort of unremarkable to one that was insanely remarkable.

And that's just the way this goes. I keep telling people this. It's like people go, oh, it was whatever, whatever, the performance was whatever, whatever, whatever. But once you know the context behind it, it becomes one of the most amazing performances ever, right? Because think about it. Right now, if I told you, Yonis had a game where he went out and he was 7 of 27 from the field, right? And he had 22 points, you know, and made a bunch. bunch of free throws and, you know, whatever, and just like,

oh, Yonis had a bad game, but if I told you that he had like a torn labor or something like that while he was doing all of that and good it out of victory for his team, even though he shot poorly, made into a bunch, the line a bunch of times, play defense, it changes the perspective of the performance. To me, for her to be up there, for her to be way up high like that, and to do all of this stuff while with child, Amazing. It's amazing. It was fantastic to see her. It shows the commitment that she has to her friends and to everything else that she got up and gave a performance. You know what I mean? While she was pregnant. It was Rihanna. So you still have fun watching her. At first, it seemed like, oh, she isn't really dancing that hard. She isn't really doing whatever. And you're wondering if she's been gone. But you realize after that she's pregnant. and it changes the context of the performance

in a really good way and makes it one of the most meaningful Super Bowl performances of all time. It's not the best Super Bowl performance of all time, but it's one of the most remarkable and meaning of Super Bowl performances of all time because it's the first time anybody ever performed up there with a baby in this stuff. God damn.

All right. Super Bowl commercial time. I have a soapbox. Go for it because you were way more into it than I was. We were talking about this yesterday, right? I have a soapbox about Super Bowl commercials. The best commercial was the farmer's dog commercial

with the dog, his master, pulling on a heartstrings. I actually asked Rachel, if I should get some farmer's dog stuff after. Rachel's like, don't get the farmer's dog. Okay, Rachel said that farmer's dog. I have an experience, and I have other friends that have used it that have experience. It's fine. I don't know.

Anything that'll keep my little woesily wabbing around longer, I'll do it. That Farmer's Dog commercial was great. The Tooby commercial was great. Yeah, it was good. When they took over your TV, Tube commercial was great. Other than that, and the Bunny commercial was great. The other two-be commercial, they threw everybody down to Rabbit Boys. Yeah, yeah.

Other than that, most of the commercials sucked ass. and I'll tell you why. We went from this time back at my day where we had all kinds of amazing commercials. We had the Clydesdales, we had the Bud Bowl, we had Spud's McKinsey, we had the,

uh, we had all kinds of different commercials that people did. We had Doritos commercials, all of that stuff, right? Basically what we have now with the super, Super Bowl commercials is 150 different celebrities talking shit

or doing shit from movies from the 80s and the 90s. It's to me whack as fuck and indicative of where society is the lowest sort of effort, right? Rather than give you a new movie that you can go see, they give you some kind of IP regurgitation

of something that came out 15, 20, 30 years ago. Rather than actually give you like a commercial that's about something that's kind of cool that sparks like a cultural phenomenon, fuck it. Let's give Adam Driver like $10 million and just let him hawk something. Let's put Will Ferrell in something. Let's put Kevin Hart in something.

It's just lazy and whack and no creativity. We're in the era of mid. It's the era of mid. Everything is met. you get all excited for all of this stuff and at the end of the day is fucking mid. It's just okay. The game was going to be a great game.

We're going to see Jalen Hertz with a chance to drive the field to tie or go ahead in the game depending on what happened. You know what happened? Something to happen. Just making it a little mid. I don't know.

I wasn't feeling the Super Bowl commercials. Rachel, what about yourself? No, I mean, I was, we discussed it. I too was like, if I see one more celebrity at this point. Surprisingly, the celebrity commercial that I liked the most was the Dunkin' Donuts commercial. I thought that was cute with Ben Affleck and J-Lo, especially because he's a super fan of Dunkin' Donuts. So I understood the attachment to it. But other than that, it was almost like a Marvel movie.

At this point, if you're not in a Marvel, all celebrities want to be a Marvel movie. It's the new thing. Everybody's like, I want to be in a Marvel movie. Sure. One thing. It's like a bucket list thing on their career. Because Marvel is the hottest thing. And they have such a huge fan base.

And it's huge for you to get into that world. That's what I'm feeling like with Super Bowl commercials at this point. I mean, who are you if you don't get a Super Bowl commercial? That's what it felt like. And it's going to be worse next year. It's going to be worse. You know what? We talked about this.

But after going through the whole game, it made me miss the crypto commercials where there was just silence. And there was a QR code. It was a cute workup. Victor was a celebrity last year. And then the whole game is also like, oh, the whole game is like, oh, here's who's here in the crowd? Here's, here's Paul McCartney. Who gives a fuck?

They do that every time, though. I'm sick of it. Here it is. Hypocrisy time. Hypocrine time. It's time for the XTMZ guy to say that this entire celebrity culture thing, which we'll be covering a little bit later on this podcast as well, this is just. There's a limit, guys.

There's a limit to where it starts to just get whacker and whacker. And to me, just watching the commercials, the commercials used to be dope. You know what I mean? They used to be super awesome. And now that's why the Farmer's Dog commercial was the best commercial. It was a real commercial about a real pup. You know what I mean?

About a real puppy. I actually like to see who's at the game. Why? Why do you care about who went to the game? it's just interesting to me. And I'm not even a big person who's into celebrity like that. You know, I'm not name-dropping my friends every chance I get on this podcast. That's not me.

The ding rule exists for you. But I like to see who's there. I'm like, oh, that's so-and-so. And they brought their kid. Oh, they brought their wife. Oh, that was cute. I don't know. I just, I like to see it.

I'm always interested. Do you know what I really don't like about it? But I don't like about seeing all the famous people at the game is that I just think it just shows me that regular people can't go to the game. It's like because like you're watching the game, right? It's Paul McCartney. It's Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch fucking Earl. Right? It's Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, all of these far people that.

Dibba, dabbat, dave, d'id, Jake, he's here, and we're walking, oh, everybody having a fun time. You know, and all of this stuff is going on, and I'm thinking, live in a place where, like, a regular person can't go to the Super Bowl. And I'm not sure if we should live, you know what, I want, like, a world where a regular person would be able to go to the Super Bowl and have fun at the Super Bowl. And it's a memory for some kids somewhere that would be able to go to the Super Bowl with their family. Maybe it would cost a lot of money, but at least it's something that's aspirational affordable.

But in the way that we're living out, the Super Bowl is, it's something for the NFL, and it's only for famous and rich people. It's just, I don't like that. It's always been that way. That's not true. But you could have, it hasn't always been expensive to go to the Super Bowl? It's maybe been expensive, but it hasn't always been, like a lot of these things are changing like this.

Like, I go back right now, I challenge everybody. do something right now. Go watch an NBA slam dunk contest on the fucking, on YouTube, go watch an NBA slam dunk contest from 1995 or 1996, and then watch it now. Now, I will say the slam dunk contest audience is better, like, for some reasons, because more black people at slam dunk contest. I'm all sorry, we can exchange, but also, you just see more like families there. Like, you just see more like people there. But now when you look at the game, you see

all this stuff, it's like, oh, shit, Jay Cole about to come out and dump. That's cool. I don't know, man. You know what, though? I guess for me, I never, I never even thought I would be Super Bowl adjacent. So, as a consumer of football, I used,

I think, I don't know if I ever desired to, I mean, well, you know, Cowboys, I guess, back in the day. But I thought it was cool. It was this big, bigger than life thing. And I never really looked at it as I'll be able to go. I just love to watch it because for me it was like, wow, it's the Super Bowl. It's this fantasy. So I don't know. I don't know if I'm like sitting at home mad because as a civilian, I can't afford to go to the Super Bowl. It's just so cool to watch. It was just this bigger than life thing.

Now that I'm an adult, it's not as big of a deal. Do you know what I mean when I say that? I don't know. I feel like you could do that with so many big things. The NBA finals, Super Bowl, college national championship. But to me, it's like, it's just, it's a reminder of sort of, like, you and I can easily go to the Super Bowl, right? Like, it's, it's, it's. That's expensive. Rachel, if you don't want to go to the Super Bowl, I could have made a couple calls and we could have gone to the Super Bowl.

No fucking problem. Okay. Like, it's fast. I'm just saying it's facts. I'm not saying it's not. It's facts. What I'm saying is that it's just to me, and maybe it's just the way that it happens,

it's just becoming a like a reminder of the gross difference and inequality. I don't know. I'm doing too much. You turn on the TV. It's everywhere. I get what you're saying. You're not wrong.

It's just everywhere. I'm doing too much. Vance, fans doing too much. Okay. I want to play this by Chris Berman real quick. I don't know if you saw this. Chris Berman had a message for everyone during NFL primetime. Donnie run the audio.

It's one of the most important messages ever. He made an observation, and I think everyone should hear it. Also, of course, two African-American quarterback starting against each other in the Super Bowl for the first time, fittingly, February 12th is Abe Lincoln's birthday. Here we go, with the highlights. Okay. Who was sitting at the table with him?

I believe it was Steve Young. Was it Booger? Was it Booger? And Booger? I think Booger was there. Yeah. Okay. This is not like a big, it's not like he said two niggers that started to Super Bowl or something like that. But this is the type of shit that I'm talking about. Nigger don't give a fuck about no Abe Lincoln. This is a deeper, it's like fittingly on A. Blinken's birthday. let me tell you, for anyone that might be listening and wonders, why is that irking to vain?

Because it gets on my fucking nerves because in some way it's saying that A-Blinkin a white guy is the one that is responsible for the advancement. That's exactly what it's saying. That's, guys, this is the problem. It's not, it's just like, you know, man. Because I don't want to not act like the emancipation proclamation isn't important. I want to act like that's not a big deal. But if you know your history and context, to just say on Abe Lincoln's birthday, the nigger who freed the slaves, look at these two blacks play football.

It's odd. It's off-putting. It's weird. And it's like, there's this kind of underlying subtext. It's like, yeah, you know, you walk around, you see a black guy do something. Hey, shout out of Abe. No, no, no, no, not shout out of Abe. Not shout out of Abe.

I'm sorry, I'm like, for real, Chris? And he's old. He probably thought he was being real as shit. Yo, man, Abe Lincoln's birthday, two black guys. He probably was just, y'all, why do you? I promise, man. No, no. It's gravy.

Just relax. Y'all got to relax, man. But this is why it's, it's, it. It's like, it rubbed me the wrong way. Like, I laugh. But one, it's just such BS. It's as if not you, yes, that is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. But you're saying it almost as if we should be thankful.

You know, it's historic for this. And fittingly, it's this, appropriately, that it's his birthday because black people should forever be thankful to Abraham Lincoln, which is not historically accurate, which highlights a deeper issue about, why, you know, they're trying to change education and not allow certain things to be taught in school. It's because Chris Berman is of the generation where he was taught, and we were taught this in school too, that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. And we praised him or were we supposed to praise him

and look at him as some sort of deity for doing that to us as black people. When the reality is, Lincoln didn't even believe that black people should have the same rights as white people. Okay. So like that's that's the kind of history we need to be talking about if you dive deeper into it. So that's why this irked me because that's not actually how we should be receiving Abraham Lincoln. Chris Vermin is younger than I thought he was. He's 67. Okay. So he's 60. How old did you think he was? I thought Chris Berman was in the 70s for sure, man. Okay. I thought Chris Berman was in the 70s for sure. But Chris Berman is younger than I thought he was. Okay. All right. So here. Here's my thing with this.

I understand that. The frustrating thing is that in all of the time that Chris Berman has been doing this thing, and all the time Chris Berman has been on television, he's been a household name, that there's been no evolution of his thought. That's the scary thing.

The scary part of it is not what you were taught. Okay? The scary part of it is what you haven't learned since. And so for me, yes. Like someone who's kind of, you know, obsessed with like decoding things and probably it's a coping mechanism. It's not something. It's like I do it because I have an anxiety disorder.

It's like whatever. I always need something running into my brain. But just to think that we're, it's 2023 and we're still back to the shout out to Abe Lincoln situation. That's like a 1975, 1970, at best, 1988. framework. You know? No, I was taught that. I was taught in school about the glory

of Abraham Lincoln. Worst thing in the world to say, but it's just so fucking odd in the times that we live in today. That's not odd. He's a 67-year-old white man. No, no, no. It's not odd.

I know what you mean. Fittingly, it's fitting to use a word from Chris Berman. It is very fitting for him. It's not shocking. to hear him say that. It just highlights the issues that we have in this country.

And as you pointed out, that there's no desire to be better. Chris Berman's, it's just funny. But Chris Berman talking about black quarterbacks. Oh, my God. Chrissy Berman. It's all great.

All right, let's take a break in them. He did it all purpose. He wanted to say it. He wanted to say it so many. He's like, enough of this black quarterback talk. That's literally, You cannot tell me anything different. He was like, I am sick of talking about how this game is about historic black quarterbacks.

Y'all brought Doug Williams out here. Y'all brought Doug Williams out here. Let me just let y'all know. Just in case y'all forgot Abe Lincoln. That is exactly what he said. I ran between all those lines. You feel like Chris Berman felt like niggas was getting too much credit. And he wanted to throw it back to old honest age.

Yes. Fittingly. Come on, fittingly is a strong word. And he ended it on that. He wanted to get that. in. It was a mic drop moment for him. I'm sorry. I can keep going. This has bothered me. All right. Let's take a break. We're going to give you Dr. Neil Joseph on the other side of this. This episode is brought to by WeatherTech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and making a mess.

You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those WeatherTech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business.

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Dr. Paineel Joseph. Penile E. Joseph, of course, he's a scholar, teacher, a public voice on race issues, especially the history of the Black Power Movement. Joint Professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public. Public Affairs and the History Department at the University of Texas also. Don't be a hater. We told you guys to pick up the sword and the shield,

the revolutionary lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We told you guys to pick up the third reconstruction. She also picked up Stokely. If you look back right here, Stokely, you'll see right there, wait until the midnight hour, you'll see right there. The sword to shield, you'll see right there. And other books that Dr. Joseph told me to read, the third reconstruction you'll see all right here. All right here.

Are you at home, Ben, or is that your home office or is that your, your, um. I'm actually at your house. This is your bookshelf. You know, if you turn around. Right. At home. Yeah, look at Dr. Joseph's bookshel. So many books.

There's a lot. You had something to say when you came on about what's going on in Texas. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, Texas is under attack. You know, people talk about. about Desantis in Florida, but the great state of Texas is under attack. Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, not only are they trying to ban the teaching of black history in K-12 education,

but they're trying to ban the teaching of and just diversity, equity, inclusion in all state agencies, right? And when we think about DEI, I actually am associate dean for DEI at the LBJ school. That's really the whole idea of bringing equity to the curriculum, the culture, the community, and the composition of state agencies, higher ed. It means bringing black and brown, queer, just folks who've been marginalized. to the table. And of course, they're all qualified, right? We never bring people to the table. It's like what you all do. You're not trying to say, hey, somebody who can't do it, we're suddenly giving them access.

We're saying people who are qualified for whatever it is they want to do, but who aren't just white, male, straight, who dominated everything since the birth of the country. So they're trying to ban that in Texas. They're trying to ban tenure. They're introducing a bunch of new bills. So this is, you know, they're trying to turn Texas into Florida, and it's really dramatically bad. And the basis of this is basically, you know, anti-blackness. You know, Soledadad O'Brien just tweeted the idea when Marjorie Taylor Green says she could have used no-wokeness at the Super Bowl, that wokeness is just at now just a phrase for not just black, but probably a racial slur as white supremacists say it, right?

So when they say it was too woke, they're basically calling us the N-word. That's where we're at. People say the anti-woke bills or DeSantis has the woke stop, woke act. And that's where we are. So this Black History Month, we have to understand what our priorities are, especially the theme is resistance. But in Texas, you know, Rachel, you know, Texas is a great state, and there are people struggling for black freedom and citizenship and dignity

and for Hispanic folks and Asian folks and queer folks and poor white folks in the state. But there's a whole other history of Texas that's a really rugged, rough history. And that's the history that kept us out of UT. UT was founded in 1983, and it's founded as a segregated school. And the reason why that should be really important for us is that that's founded only 18 years after the end of the Civil War. So UT should not have been a racially segregated school. We had just fought a civil war where over 700,000 people died.

So UT would not be racially segregated, but it still was. So we have a hard history. And this Black History Month is still playing out here in Texas. Yeah, you mentioned Texas being a great state, but it seems that the other side of Texas is what's louder than anything else. You know, we talk about Descances and Abbott on this podcast quite a bit. And I swear they're in a competition of who can be more outrageous, racist. you know, it's wild how these two are going head to head. And if Florida does it, you very well know that other red states, Texas being included,

are going to do the same thing. This state representative, Carl Tepper, who is, who filed this bill, he said that DEI doesn't stand for diversity, equality, and inclusion, that it stands for division, inequity, and indoctrination. Yeah. Oh, all I was going to say is, yes, please speak on that. And then also, based on how we've seen other things go through, you know, Congress in Texas, see things get past, see things move forward.

How likely do you think that this is going to be another thing that they are successful on with their agenda? Well, because Texas has been gerrymandered, racially gerrymandered for decades and decades, remember, Texas is the home of the all-white primary that was challenged in the Supreme Court, 1927. and it was an all-white Democratic Party. So we have to remember the parties flipped. The contemporary Republican Party is actually the old Democratic Party, which is the Dixie Krat Party

and the Party of White Supremacy. A lot of people kind of don't understand that, but that's what happened, starting in the late 60s. What was the just said that flip? Tell them Dr. Joseph. The flip was done because of civil rights. Lyndon Johnson said after he passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,

we've lost the South for a generation. but it was for more than just a generation. The racist white South went and incorporated and took over the entire Republican Party. That's what they did. And it wasn't just MAGA. It is old Dixie Kratz who, these are the people who they killed Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman in Mississippi in 1964. They murdered Emmett Till in 1955. You know, when they were looking for Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman.

Goodman in Mississippi, they dragged several rivers for two months, and they came up with eight torsos and heads and limbs of black people who had been lynched and placed in rivers in Mississippi. True story. This is 1964. They finally found the bodies of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, two white, one black on August 4th, 1964 in Mississippi in an earthen dam. That's where they found it, right? And so, you know, this is this is the history that we should be talking about.

But it's also, you know, we talk about resistance. We, you know, we should be angry. We should be angry. I saw a man your interview with Acho. And that's one for the books, the legendary interview. But we should be angry. And I think that, you know, even as, you know, some folks might not be, feel so connected to this history that they feel they're sort of above it and can be really cool about it.

But this is our history and this is our people being a, attacked and being killed, and we should be angry. We should certainly organize that, but we should be mad. We should be mad, and we should be upset about this. So I understand, and we should feel passionate that this is not the kind of world we want to live in. But we have to understand that what's going on now is exactly what was going on in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s.

For a second, forget the 1960s, forget King, forget all the stuff you see in the media. in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, including right in Texas, I've got, Merle Petrie has a great book on a black leadership, which is really just about black reconstruction in Texas, who's Merle Petrie, great historian at Texas Southern University, African-American woman, M-E-R-L-E, last name is P-I-T-R-E. These are the people who do the root work. She has a great history book about Texas Southern University, too. So when we talk about HBCUs,

and why it's so important, right? But, you know, this is what was happening to us right after we got voting rights. This is what was happening to us right after we got birthright citizenship. We were being oppressed with these laws and this legislation that said black citizenship and dignity

was reverse discrimination, that it was reverse racism against white people. So this is an important time for us. Because everybody who thought to themselves, you grow up and you think to yourself, man, what would I have done in those times? You know, in those times, whether it's the Black Panthers or Martin Luther King Jr. Angela Davis or Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, you're in it. You're in it right now. These are the times. So this is not this hot. You know, you can't sit back and say, oh, these other people did it for me. And they achieved for me. And now I've got it easy. You're in, you know, just a. an updated, evolved version. They didn't have Twitter. We're now spoutable with Chris Boosie.

They didn't have that. Shout out to Chris. Yeah, shout out to Chris. They didn't have, you know, higher learning and podcasts. But the forces that we're facing and we're up against, they confronted the same forces of DeSantis and Dan Patrick and Donald Trump and all that we're facing. They confronted. So I want to ask you about something.

Before I get to the sort of civil rights aspect of our talk, I want to ask you about not a specific case, but an overall idea. So there's a case going on in Colorado right now with Mallory family who relocated from Houston to Colorado. And they are the victims of what they say are, It's wholesale white terrorism and the neighbors and people in surrounding areas that don't want them to have their farm. They say that the crops are being poisoned, the livestock is being killed, and they are being intimidated.

Okay. We talked about this with Hawk Newsom on Monday, excuse me, on Friday. And it's happy to say that some money has been raised to help Hawk and the rest of the activists go down there to have some of the stuff. But we're going to need more stuff with them. But beyond that, I want to ask you a question. I talk about it a lot here, but I want maybe if you know, to go a little deeper, in the history of black land ownership in America and how that changed to post-1910s, 1915s, 1920s, how did black people go from owning the most land that they've ever owned in Acreage

in around 1905, 1906, 1907 to now owning literally. the least amount of land that we've ever owned to the point to maybe Paul Allen and a couple of other people, like the top of four white landowners in the country own more land now than all of black America combined. How does that happen from us having land to not have it? What would doubt? Yeah. You know, there's a great, the great book that was a National Book Award finalist, his name is George Floyd, actually does a great, history of this through George Floyd's family and the way in which the Floyd's, both on his mother and father's side, they had some prosperity and they had some land ownership in North Carolina and

other places and that land was taken away from them. So it's a number of different ways, both I'll say legally and extra legally. And by legally, these are things that should not have been legal, but they were legal because it was against me. Right. Right. The extra legal, I'm I mean is the violence, the terror. There's a great essay in the 1619 project by Tremaine Lee. Oh, it's fantastic. And I actually helped edit that essay for the New York Times. So it's fantastic.

Tramaine Lee, the legacy chapter and also the chapter dispossessed in dispossession in 1619 project. So long story short, the way that you. did it was several things. So one was what they're facing in the case you just talked about, in terms of poisoning livestock, driving people out through terror, maybe burning people out, really just physically intimidating them. Another way of doing it was just simply not acknowledging black ownership of the land. And this is what we have to understand. When it comes to land and property in the United States, whiteness protects you and your land. Because what it does is it provides a kind of legitimacy and authority in terms of your

neighbors, so your neighbors aren't going to really mess with you. Now, there are exceptions to this, the range wars, the Montana, Wyoming, the 1860s and 1870s. And that pitted small white capitalists against huge white capitalists who were going to put in. the railroad, and they at times even murdered the smaller white capitalists. I just want people to know. So there are exceptions. But for the most part, as the country industrialized, you started to see much more legitimacy granted to this idea of ownership and land ownership and even the homestead, right? The Homestead Act. And whiteness protected people. And it provided you a context to go into a local court and say, here's my land to get somebody who was a geographer who could really say,

here's the land, here's where things are, a surveyor, a surveyor who says, hey, your land, van ends right here from the west to the east and this is where it is. And we've been having that for, you know, over a century and a half. Black people didn't have that luxury. So even if they had land that they had purchased, a lot of times locally, that purchase, that purchase, was not accepted, or even if it was accepted in one historical era, in another, when black people became more vulnerable, it was not accepted. So it became almost impossible to transfer generational wealth. And this is where we get to the heirs property in the black community. Because, and there's, there's been some great work done on airs property where you're not able to just say, hey, my son, my daughter, my

family is going to get this property. And then legally, anybody who's related to you, this has happened to Prince. There's a hundred. Explain them what Air's property is real quick. Air's property is the idea that if you, if you don't have a will, and this happened to Prince, Prince left no will. And there are 140 living relatives connected to Prince biologically who then put a claim in on his hundreds of millions of dollars a state. Right. And so, basically if you don't leave a will, anybody who is your biological heir, this can include cousins, it include aunts and uncles, certainly your children can make a claim on this state and on the property, right? And that becomes really, really hard to deal with because unless that group of

people are all in together and saying, here's how we're going to divvy this up, what people did with heirs property was they would make it, they would, they would, they would buy up a share of somebody's claim, right? White folks would buy up a share of somebody's claim and then make claim to the entire property, make a claim to the entire property. So that was one of the ways, but it's been, it's many multiple ways, including courthouses that won't accept wills that are that were drawn up by African American lawyers. I mean, this is crazy, the way in which the land taken away, including, you know, the New Deal takes away a lot of black land, right? The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which is supposed to help white and black farmers,

doesn't give any money to black farmers and allows white farmers to buy out black farmers, right? And both the New Deal and even before the New Deal, depressions that happen in the context of World War I and the Great Migration, what white farmers often did was termed black owners of acres of land into sharecroppers and into debt peonage farmers for them, right? And so this is a combination of racial terror, of the law, of black people at times leaving land that they owned because they didn't want to die for that land anymore, right? Taunasi Coates's case for reparations gets deeper into this. A great book is Nell Urban Painter's exodusters, which looks at the black folks who Tony Morrison later writes about Nicodemus, Kansas from the 1870s and the 1880s who migrated to get their own community. That's really the

first great migration is a migration out west by African Americans. And then we get the other migration starting really right around World War I out to places like St. Louis and Akron, Ohio, and Cincinnati and Los Angeles, Oakland. And really, truthfully, Los Angeles, Oakland, we went to them in big ways during the Second World War. And we went to those places because, and that's why you have a Calabama accent, right? Houston, a lot of people from Houston went to Los Angeles. Why? The war is so crazy. And there's a manpower shortage, human power shortage.

16 million people are away. And black folks, including, people don't talk about this often, black women and men, but women too, there's a black Rosie, the Riveter. called her something else not really who get jobs in the defense industry right so that's what happened

we lost the land out of a combination of physical violence and terror but also legal chicanery and just just plain theft you know

we got put you know you see that in the Tremaine Lee essay and that updates into the 1940s black man very prospect He's got a gas station, a store, and he's murdered in broad daylight.

He's murdered in broad daylight and never able to pass on that generational wealth to his family. Dr. Joseph, I recently just learned about my own family that we, on my dad's side, first off, my Lindsay, the name that I have, was changed after their land was taken from them in Louisiana. It's actually a lot. I learned this in the last couple of years that my great, great-grandfather was run, sent the family off to Texas to defend the land because the KKK was trying to steal it in Louisiana and they never saw them again. So I think if you're if we all trace back, we would probably have

a similar story of how land was taken away and wasn't passed on to us. Peebacking on what Van was talking about, about talking about the civil rights movement and you mentioned black women and I want to get into that. I think that before I, after, once I went to copy, It changed. But while I was in high school, I don't know, I definitely wasn't taught in my school, but I don't know if I could have named more than five women, black women, who were active in the civil rights movement. It came on my own, taking certain classes in college, expanding on that curiosity. And I think that most people would be able to relate to that. What I find interesting is in reading your book and then also seeing other things is how black women were treated in the civil rights movement. I was reading something that Barbara Reynolds had said.

And if people aren't familiar with her, she's a journalist minister. and she was, her recordings were used in Coretta Scott King's memoir. She said there were hundreds of unnamed women who participated in the movement. And she goes on to say, Dr. King was a chauvinist. And she says that men like Kim, quote, could not assert their manhood in the general society because they would be killed if they stood up for anything. So they asserted their masculinity in other ways within their own community. community. Dr. Joseph, how true is that? Yeah, no, that's real. That's real. I think it's really

complicated. I want to break it down. But Martin Luther King is part of the patriarchal sexist. We could say misogy noir tradition, both in the black church and the black community. I also think it's very complicated in this sense that when we think about gender and we think about patriarchy in the black and white community, people can do multiple things at the same time. They can have multiple identities. So you can have, and just to name some black women from the civil rights area, because you said, five, you know, there's everybody from Mary McLeod Bethune, of course, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, but Fran Beale, Gwen Patton, um, uh, uh, there's, there's so many different black women throughout the ages. And it's

important, um, sort of to remember them. Um, Ruby Doris Smith, uh, so many different black women who are part of student nonviolent coordinating committee, part of the Congress of Racial Equality, Sonia Sanchez, you know, it's just a plethora, artists like Nikki Giovanni, you know, different poets, politicians like Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan. So it's really we can, you know,

and I would, with Barbara Reynolds, I'd say that there's really thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of black women who are part of it, you know, like their male counterparts. So the sexism and patriarchy is complicated. And it's there. It's absolutely there. And King is a patriarching, is what we now call a womanizer, a philanderer. At the same time, people like I think Coretta Scott King are not victims. They have agency too. And they're trying to operate within a structure that allows all this stuff to happen, but they want their own dignity. I think Dr. King, Corretta Scott King, King, have a deep, deep love affair, even within the context of that. It's not things that we would accept today, right, unless people, some people say they have open relationships and actually do accept it,

right? But it's really complicated. So I want to say, yes, it's there. It's definitely prevalent, but also black women within that social historical context are pushing back against that, and they have their own agency. So I don't want to put them as victims, but I do think that King and Malcolm and black men in that historical context, you know, they are both fighting against racism externally, but they're also caught up in this patriarchal framework

of what freedom means. I think Malcolm makes some progress. You know, he goes to Africa. He makes some progress by seeing African revolutionaries alongside black women and men there. I think King, it's more of a work in progress because I don't know if King is ever able to, the way Malcolm, with the organization of Afro-American unity,

he has Lynn Schiflet and different black women, including his sister, L.M. Collins, who are his key advisors, and they're in that circle of trust, right? And women who are in the circle of trust, and he doesn't have a romantic relationship with them. Right. He's just trusting as advisors.

thing as advisors and as equals. I think over time he gets it. I would never call Malcolm a feminist, but I'm saying he's getting it. He's involving. He's assassinated at 39, you know, so who knows what he could have become. But I would say that that King is more caught up in a chauvinism, a sexism, misogy noir, that is just integral to that period. And that's why I look. No woman, no black woman speaks at the marchion. Washington, right, in 1963. We're about to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. That's unimaginable now, especially during this recent period where black women have been, you know, front and center from Stacey Abrams to Kamla to David still, Tamika Mallory,

Alicia Garza, right? You know, so that's what I would say. But I think it's complicated because I remember talking to a bunch of sisters at the Million Man March. I was 22. And, you know, You had some toxic shit to say, didn't you? Yeah. You were ready for it. I was talking to them and I was, you know, but we were going back and forth. And at the time, I was in grad school and I was studying this stuff. But there were black women who, because I read something, a critique by black feminist of the march, because the march was just men.

But there were some women who were at the march. And I said, well, what do you, you know, what do you think about this? this, you know, there's a critique, Angela Davis, other people, Bell Hooks are saying, this is, you know, sexist, you know, Farrakhan has a real problematic relationship to just a lot of different things, like what's going on here. And they really push back against the kind of intellectual, progressive sort of perspective in the sense of saying, hey, these brothers need to get their act together. And I'm all for this, right? And I don't. And I don't. don't think just because I'm all for this that somehow I'm not, I don't have any consciousness.

You know what I mean? So it became this, it became, it became something very complicated where it's not that black women somehow wanted to be oppressed by black men within the nation of Islam or people at the Million Man March, but they felt that they did want to see these black men who were acting as upstanding leaders. They didn't want to be, um, true. And they didn't want to be trampled on or anything, but they felt these black men needed to handle their business, right? So it's a very complicated thing. And somebody who grew up in the black church, I feel the same way. When you're in these grassroots, regular, ordinary, the black quotidian, it's not quite

as cut and dry as when you're in an academic setting and you're saying, hey, here's, you know, here's this very specific argument. You can have a black woman who's like, no, I'm strong and I'm brilliant. But I do want somebody who is going to be there for me in the context of the family. Whatever new academics call that. Do you see what I'm saying? And it doesn't mean you can invalidate my experience because this is how I want a relationship, right? So it's a really interesting, and that's what I said.

It's really, it's complicated, right? Because we can hold these ideas, but then how do we actually live our lives? Right, right. And the sword of shield, it's interesting in the way you position this with Dr. King because you don't really pull any punches about who Dr. King was. But it doesn't seem to be something that weighs the book down, or weighs the characterization of Martin Luther King down in any way. It's done very deftly, and it's done with a great degree.

of nuance. And we don't seem to be able to do that in general society as far as to have conversations about how women were erased in some of these movements. And at the same time, not diminish the greatness of the men or the figures that came from these movements. It seems like we really struggle with how we're supposed to do that. And Martin Luther King Jr. is a flashpoint of that struggle. He's exemplary of it.

It seems difficult to talk about him in any voice other than saintly praise. Yeah. And because of that, there's so many lessons from his life that us as black men can take outside of that, that it seems like we don't get a chance to actually learn. What do you think about that? No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, King has a relationship with food, with sex, with pleasure. that many black men, I think, struggle with, struggle with, right, with drinking.

You know, like King, King likes to have a good time. He likes to have a good time, right? And he's struggling with that his whole life, right? And what I mean by food is that King loves some black food, soul food. He loves food, right? And he struggles with his weight as he gets more stressed. King has sex and likes sex. And obviously has that.

contradiction of liking sex outside of his marriage. That's a big contradiction as a preacher. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Van's face. I'm like, what is so funny to you? Because I said he likes,

because I said he likes sex? I don't know what has him so tickled. I mean, that's what he. Like Dr. King, I'm not supposed to like that. He's like, I have a failure

is not going to be that funny. I try. I tried. Then I looked at Rachel and Rachel caught me. Rachel caught me trying not to laugh. Okay. He just, okay.

He has sex. It was just King has sex and likes sex. Okay, okay, yeah. Because he does, you know, that's a hard thing for us to come to terms with. He does. He likes sex, right? And I think sometimes people,

people will say things like, oh, was Dr. King a sex addict and all these different things? I wouldn't even go that far. I mean, I think he is a celebrity the way in which a lot of folks are celebrities in that time, including President of the United States, President Kennedy, right? And he's on the road a lot. He's away from his family a lot, right? And so I think within that context, that becomes something he struggles with. Dr. King is a cigarette smoker who smoke smoke cigarettes for his entire life. Most people never see a picture of King with a cigarette. He was deathly afraid of being photographed, smoking, or anything. Dr. King likes alcohol, right? I don't feel Dr. King was an alcoholic, but at times, especially near the end, they said he started to drink

quite a bit. I mean, he was stressed, who amongst us wouldn't drink if we're constantly facing death penalty, right? And assassination threats, right? So I think finding that out about King, and I talk about the plagiarism charges, makes him more human. And King was hugely brilliant. I think he plagiarizes parts of the dissertation, and that's been proven. But if you read a letter from Birmingham jail, which is put together from scraps that he writes from jail, King is absolutely brilliant. The only reason why I feel he plagiarized is because he's in a hurry to get the dissertation

done. He's about to get married. He's about to start a new job. and he becomes really sloppy and just takes these shortcuts. I think all these things make him much more human. And as a black man, he struggles with ideas of masculinity. And you can see it in the sword and the shield when at times he's extremely angry with what Malcolm X is saying.

He's so angry that by May of 20, of 1963, after Malcolm is calling him anything but a child of God after Birmingham, saying that he's a coward, he's this. He's at a huge rally, 35,000 people in Los Angeles. And he's talking to Malcolm without ever saying Sammy Davis Jr. is there. Everybody's there. And what he says is that nonviolence is a tool of people who are powerful, who are courageous, who are muscular. And then he says it's the cowards who don't, who won't embrace nonviolence. He's talking about Malcolm X. He's talking about Malcolm X. He's saying you're the coward. I'm not the coward. I mean, and King practically wants to say, you know, MF to this guy. You know, so King is like us. Like, he's not, he's just, he's just more disciplined publicly, right? But King, I mean, there's parts of the King that wants to get in a fist fight with Malcolm.

Room me my fate, Malcolm? Yeah. Yeah. Who are you? Who are you to challenge me with everything that I'm going through? So he really, he really teaches us a whole lot about being, you know, trying to be a complicated black man who, who is not oppressing black women, who's not. mistreating your children.

King never hits his children. You know, that stops the cycle because he was hit by Daddy King, right? You know, and as somebody, I grew up in a black household where I was here. I'm stopping the cycle with my daughter right now. You know, I was hit, right?

So I think King is really important for us about, in terms of black masculinity. And Malcolm, too, but in a different way. You know, Malcolm, too, in a different way. I am curious if a conversation was ever had publicly where there was some acknowledgement from the men and black men in the civil rights movement of how they weren't treating the women in the same way. And I say this because it's obvious at this point that we know now that the civil rights movement

could not have happened without women. They were organizers. They were educators. They were strategists. They were writers. They were heavily involved. I mean, Dorothy Hype, shout out to. Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated.

I mean, she was on stage at the March, advanced office, she was on stage at the March on Washington. And the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which I think sometimes people forget about, did not include sex. It didn't originally include gender. That didn't come till later, which also shows that women were placed on the back burner.

And I'm so I'm just curious if there was, I read something where James Farmer has talked about later in life about Dorothy Hyatt and spoke towards that and how she often wasn't interviewed by the press because of sexism. But were there any men that were speaking up and saying, no, we got to, you know, like we got to include the women. We got to give them leadership roles in these organizations. We got to make them the face of some of this.

Was there any of that? Well, I think that there's going to be some an activist organization. Certainly like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and there were black women like lawyer Richardson and the Fran Beals and the Gwen Pattons who are leaders in SNCC, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. So, yes, I think there were,

I think they weren't happening enough at the national level, because by the time you get to the national level, groups like the Congressional Black Caucus and a guy like Jesse Jackson, they thought, for instance, when Shirley Chisholm ran, that it wasn't going to be good

if it wasn't a black man to run. So in the context of the 1970s, because, look, we still don't have a woman president. We still have never had a woman president in the United States. So it was perceived as weakness. And part of that has to do with the fact that the freedom dreams of the black freedom struggle have always contained attention, where they run along multiple tracks. One track interprets freedom as a kind of black male patriarchy. that mirrors white male patriarchy with black men in an unfettered way having the prerogatives of white male patriarchy. So we become the new capitalist, the head of the household. In a way,

the nation of Islam for all of its radicalism, and there are aspects of it that are radical and militant, is quite conservative in wanting that kind of small petty bourgeois black male patriarchal capitalism. There's no room for people who are queer. There's no room for women's leadership other than the way in which the box that black men might be putting them in. That's one version. Another version is a very expansive version of black women as co-architects. And you can see that with Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Francis Harper, Mariah Stewart, Nanny Helen Burroughs, certainly Dorothy, Hype, Mary McLeod, Bethune, just so many different others, right? And so that's a huge tension. And that tension continues to this day, right?

It's just that in recently, because of people like Michelle Obama and Black Lives Matter, for the first time in American history, we've seen black women who are fully acknowledged as leaders and architects of the freedom struggle in addition to being individual, you know, talented artists and creators than activists, right? So you've seen more light on black women right at this moment in American history than ever before. And data-wise, we have more black women than men because of structural racism, graduating from high school, graduating from college, getting master's degrees, getting PhDs, going to medical school, and really being successful.

You know what I mean? Like, there's more black women at UT than black men. at UT, right? We might look at it and think differently because you think about the football team at UT or the basketball team at UT, but black women are finding much more success in higher education, much more success in corporate America. Guess what, Rachel, the first two black people to ever become presidents of Ivy League universities, Brown University, and now it's going to be Harvard, is Ruth Simmons at Brown, Bruce Simmons, who is now retiring at PVMU and coming to Rice. And now Claudine Gay, Haitian sister,

shout out to Claudine Gay. And that shows you the difference, right? It's unimaginable that if we think about the Second Reconstruction or the 1980s or 1990s, if they were going to, the first black president of Ivy League would have been a black woman. Do you see what I'm saying? Harvard's first black president is not Barack Obama.

It's Claudine Gay, right? And so it's showing you something about the valence and the leadership, the stature of Blanche, of black women in in in in in in in American culture that that didn't exist before you know what I mean when you just see it so it's really it's really there I think even still though within our community there's tensions about what does that mean and how do we both in terms of if you're an ambitious black woman ambitious black men be on the same team and I'm not talking about romantically I'm just saying on the same team because there's really competition right you know

I mean. Because we all know we live in a capitalist society. There aren't slots for everybody. You ain't all going to be president of Harvard or everybody's not going to have a nationally broadcast podcast. You know what I mean? So now we really are in a kind of tension, but we can also be in solidarity with each other, which is the better route, I would argue. Give them a book. Give them a book. We're going to start doing this. Penil Joseph's Book of the Month. You must read this book, okay?

Wherever the book is, it could be one of your books, Penil. It could be a different book. Give them a book. Give them a book to read. Do it now. You know, I love a couple of books. Dante Stewart's shouting in the fire

an American epistle and it's on religion. Dante is somebody to have him on the show. He's a former Clemson University athlete. turned writer, black Pentecostal who went through the white evangelical church and is now out. Oh, yeah. As a radical black figure who talks about anxiety, depression, talks about trauma and grief.

Really brilliant brother. We just had him at University of Texas down here and he just lit it up. Dante Stewart, shouting in the fire is one that's really brilliant. Just one. Just one. Okay. Don't weigh him down. Hold on.

Shout in the fire. Shout to the fire. Shout to the fire. Don't shout. Don't weigh him down. Penil. We'll bring you back on. We'll bring you on.

And we'll do Penil Joseph's book of the month. Shout in the fire. That book should be a bestseller. That is a unbelievable book. What did you say? What did you say, Dr. King liked? What did you say? Never mind.

Okay. Okay. You guys. That is a. That's Penil Joseph. Look, the ratio of black women in these movements will not continue. It's important to know how integral we've been together as allies culturally, black men and black women. Okay, it's very important.

It's very important. Penneal Joseph from the University of Texas, LBJ School of Hard Knocks. We appreciate you coming back on higher learning breath. book of the month every single every single month we're going to give them Penil Joseph's book of the month we need to do this

and then at the end was the second month so at the end of the end of the year we'll round them all up okay all right thank you brother thank you for joining this man thank you always for adults with Crohn's disease

or ulcerative colitis symptoms every choice matters Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject tremphia, proper training is required. Tremfaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with

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the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo. Be a 2%er. Learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms of play. Okay. Penneal Joseph.

Genius. I know. So good. Those students are so lucky to have him. Are you serious? Yeah. Maybe they are. Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe they are. Maybe I should be teaching them. Who knows? I could teach them all kinds of things. I can teach a Marvel class at the LBJ school. I could teach a class. That's a public policy school.

So no. You wouldn't be. I could do nothing. Peel know Joseph is the man. You could teach a Marvel class, though. Intellectual hero. Actually, no. Do you know how many people out there

that know so much more about Marvel than me? Really? Oh, my God. Whatever. All right. Speaking of powerful messages, I would like to hear a powerful message from the White House

about what's going on in our skies. Okay. I'm not sure what's happening. I'm good. You don't care. No, I care. I find it terrifying. And I would just rather be ignorant.

I'm not in a rush. Please, don't. No, I care a lot. Okay. the U.S. has shot down four objects in eight days. This is since the Chinese spy balloon situation. There have been four of the objects that have been shot down. It's just unprecedented in peacetime people say.

Like, hereon, shot down an unified flying objects, unidentified objects, okay? Canada, an identified object. Joe Biden ordered these things to be shot down. What are you shooting? What are you spraying around? You just cut one? Copper keeps passing gas. Oh, copper farted.

Do you do that thing to where do you get gassy? Is that a thing with you? All the time. You do. I'm a gassy person. I'm very open about this. Okay. So you're gassy and then you spray that.

So how do you know when it's you or when it's copper? Okay. I always can tell when it's me. I can feel it leaving my body. Sometimes it happens to me and I don't know. that's not me. I'm not loose like that. Copper, on the other hand.

Copper on the other hand. It's the medicine that he's taking, and it is just foul. Just gets it, right? Yeah. Okay, so part of the reasons for these shootdowns is a heightened alert that we're under, following the spot movement when they got shot down.

This is, according to General Glenn Van Hurt, who's the head of Norak. and the U.S. North of Command. He said this in a briefing with reporters. Since then, there have been fired jets that have been all over the place and they've shot down stuff over Canada, Alaska. Pentagon officials have said that they pose no security threats, but so little was known about them

that the Pentagon officials were ruling nothing about, including UFOs. Okay. This is a frustrating situation for me, for many reasons. Okay. I don't feel that we're getting the transparency that we should be getting from the government on this. What are you expecting them to tell you? I'm expecting, look, I understand that the situation is still pretty fluid.

But they've shot the stuff down and they know what was shot down. Right. I don't think they know. They know not to call them balloons. They're calling them objects specifically, and they're not ruling out the fact that it could be something extraterrestrial. Honestly, Van, that's enough for me.

They don't even know how they're flying. That has also been revealed. They cannot figure out how the things are flying. I'm out. So one of the objects shot down was cylindrical and silverish gray with no identifiable propulsion system. Another was shot down. Small, cylindrical, cylindrical, cylindrical, cylindrical object.

The third was an octagonal structure with strings. I'm good. I feel like they know more here. I feel like they know more here. I don't. This is where I get into my temporal hatchet. I feel like they know more here. I feel like there's something to be known.

Look, this could be the beginning of sort of. The end? Well, no. I would say some escalating tensions between the United States and China or other people. Or Russia, yeah. Or Russia. I read about different spy planes that we've had. And the United States is rush to invent technology and spy planes that are capable of flying so high that it's very difficult to shoot them now.

That even though we've had these planes, different types of spy bombers and all of this stuff, fly super high. most of the fucking space guys are wearing like oxygen masks and a lot of planes. Some of them have still been shot at and shot down. So nations spying on each other and using surveillance methods, be them drones, planes, whatever they are. That is a tale as old as time. There's nothing new about that. This right here is peculiar in the frequency and the short time in which this is happening.

And also the relative caginess from government, government officials on this. And it's even more scary if the shit they haven't and they don't know what it is. Because guess what? They're supposed to know what it is. Well, if it's something that they've never seen before, they might not know.

I think you're wanting to hear something from them that they really can't give you. And I don't think because this is something unprecedented, they're even saying that. They want to be matter of fact when they tell you and not cause

public outrage, like just a full out scare from the public. I'm already scared. And I think them not knowing because that's what I really think it is and them not knowing, like it not being matter of fact

is even more terrifying to me. That's what I think it is. If you don't know what it is, how do you even know that you should shoot it down? if you don't know Oh, because it was in in the pathway of commercial planes.

Okay, cool. It was in the pathway of commercial planes. Because one of them was in fucking Alaska. So what I'm saying is... No, Canada actually asked for them to shoot that one down, I believe. Okay, so what I'm saying is that they at least know that they pose some sort of threat. The commercial planes point is a fair point.

And I've read a fair degree about this. There seems to be an awakening that's happened since the spy balloon situation. And perhaps there are more surveillance objects over U.S. airspace and Canadian airspace than they thought that they were. And for some reason, they either don't recognize these objects or they don't want to tell us that the Chinese are looking as hard as what they are or some other nation is looking as hard as what they are. But as fast as we've learned about all of these different incidents, you'd think that there would be a very substantive briefing to the American people about what's going on here. Look, it could be some alien.

Today they gave us nothing. They had a briefing today, nothing. Donnie, what do you think? I'm a believer. I think that it's aliens. I'm like halfway You sound excited

Donnie Do you sound excited Donnie Do you say You're a fucking freak It just sounds It sounds crazy But I don't know It's just it's

Like I'm in an alien mindset When it comes to I think Like right now I'm halfway through The first season The X-Files So I'm like

This is the time Of this Speaking Jesus It feels like Ashley Yes What do you think?

I mean Dottie's excited over there. I think it's terrifying if it is aliens. The government lies about lots of stuff, so why wouldn't it be aliens? You know what I mean? Or it's something even worse.

It's like a country doing some weird stuff. So I don't know. I mean, what would you rather? Is that your serious question, Van? Would you rather it be some spy intelligence or extraterrestrial activity? Well, so this is the, This is the thing that I believe about aliens fundamentally, right? I believe that the aliens are coming here.

There's just no good reason for them to come here. Yes, it's not curiosity. Hawking said that if Hawking said that the aliens would come within 150 years or something like that. They said if they did come, then the odds are that they were nomadic, killer aliens that had exhausted all the resources on their planet. and they were looking for a new planet to take all the resources from because it's a very long way to travel. Okay.

Now, that is very terrifying. Stephen Hawke, rest of peace, Hawk. Like, it's very terrifying. I tend to believe there are other people who think it's different, right? Other people who think maybe not saying it enough, people who think it's not the,

they might come here and be nice, and you know what I'm saying? We might start sharing candy and like going, you know, whatever. But that's very scary, obviously, because we'd be dealing with the technology and the civilization that we can't really match wits with if they're coming from that far away.

If it's spy stuff, it's not that big of a deal to me. We spy on them, them spy on us, this is the deal. You know what I'm saying? I mean, we might not send... This is the deal. We might not send balloons over them, but we had definitely during the Cold War

that other times have had planes flying around, taking pictures of people. It's kind of a deal. You know what I mean? So, um, the, hold on.

The White House did say this today, though. There's again, no, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. This takedowns. It just came up. Told,

it says, John Kirby, the spokesperson from the National Security Council said that all manners of innocuous craft can fly at the same oxytutes. It includes aircraft used by companies or countries for purposes that are not nefarious at all.

And they said that all of these were determined not to pose a direct threat to people on the ground. They were also found to be uncrewed and have limited abilities from a lack of communication signals to a lack of obvious propulsion capabilities. So these seem to be

things that were floating around, doing different stuff, So it doesn't seem to be aliens. Donnie, you fucking freak. It's probably the fact that we are now on the lookout for these things since the spy balloon. And because we're on the lookout for them,

we are fine. Okay. One more time. We're not going to do the DD Gene versus Ruby Rose versus Hallie Bailey thing because it's just too much. But I do want to talk about this. Are they your friends?

I don't know any of them but them's your kids man like some babies Ruby Rose I don't even know I actually I know who Ruby Rose is because

you know but like I don't even know who DDG is I don't know who that is you don't know who DDG is you've never seen him with Hallie I know that he's with Hallie

but I don't know what like DDG does is a he's big on social he is a rapper. He's very big on social media, but more on YouTube. Like his whole family does stuff, and he's got this really funny nephew called Woo-Wop.

And did you ever see he had this viral moment, the little nephew, he's a really funny kid. And his dad or somebody dressed him up as like an emo kid. And when they took off his his like veil or whatever,

he had like spikes on his necklace and like all these, just, he was emo. And he started singing this song, I want to kill my mom. I want to kill my dad. And, like, he stood in front of a room of, like, black people. And they were like, what the fuck? And he was saying, I'm going to say it to you.

Anyways, Wu-WOP is hilarious. Hilarious. So that's how I got to know who DDG is because of Who-WAP. All right. So they're all going back and forth. It seems like Ruby Rose. in DDG or whatever and how is in the middle of it, whatever.

It's really kids stuff. I really don't know what's wrong. No, I don't want to get into it. It's just elbow them. He says that he stopped describing himself as a black actor because it puts himself in a box. He opened up about race and nationality

and a new cover of Esquire magazine. He says, didn't become an actor because I didn't see black people doing it and I want to change that. What? I did it because I thought that's a great profession and I could do a good job at it. As you get at the ladder, you get asked what it's like to be the first black to do this or that. Well, it's the same. It's the same as it would be if I were white.

It's the first time for me. I don't want to be the first black. I'm the first interest. Stop describing myself as a black actor when I realized put me in a box. You've got to grow. We've got to. Our skin is no more than that. It's just skin.

Rent over. Okay, since then, Adrian Seldman has come out and said, but he does, he identifies himself. There's nothing more than a strong black man. He's a man, strong black man. He understands what it's like

to be a black man. However, as an actor, which is his profession, John Muega came out. Shout out to John Muega. John Muega came out and challenged Idris Elba on this. And, he said, you know, look, I'm a black man.

Black man, but as an actor, doesn't think the Black man, doesn't need the Black thing is necessary. Rich? I mean, what else are you as an actor? Let me mean, what else is? He's an actor. He's fucking Luther. Okay, but that's what I'm saying. But every time you step into one of these roles, you're a black man in these roles.

Do you know what I'm saying? So it doesn't make sense for him to say, don't put me in a box. When we look at you on the screen, we see you as a black man. When you play Luther, you're a black man. I don't understand I understand what he's saying but I also don't understand what he's saying. Do you see what I'm saying?

You might want people to see you just as an actor but they will always see you by your color first and if you do identify yourself as a black man then you know walking through this earth as a black man that is the first thing that people see about you. Maybe he's saying he doesn't want it to be

so much of a conversation because everybody has been speculating whether or not he's going to be the next James Bond. and if so, he would be the black James Bond. And so maybe he's saying, I'm tired of that conversation surrounding it. But like, if you're the first black James Bond, you should also understand what representation means

and how important that could be for people who grew up watching James Bond, who are fans of it, to now see a black man step in that role and be as, I've never seen a James Bond movie, but to step in that role and be cool, calm and collected as James Bond comes off being, see a black man do that, that might be powerful to some black people for representation's sake. So I don't really understand. I don't understand where Eidus is going with this.

I really don't. I really don't. Or why he felt the need to do this. So there's a, there's a, there's a fortune the road here. There's like a split. For you? No, I just think period. Okay.

It's important to talk about. Okay. So I don't look at black as an individual characteristic. And I think that might be what separates the two methods of thought. Black to me is not an individual characteristic. You know, like I have like, I have like scaly feet from basketball. You know, my feet or all my heels are messed up.

My toes are messed up from all the time. I put it on the court. Hoping didn't. But it's, okay, that's an individual characteristic. Something that other people might have, but that's something that I've done to myself. Black, to me, my black, is not just who I am.

It's the culmination of who millions of people have been. And I know that that sounds like bullshit. I know that that sounds like an impossible burden. And I know that that sounds like something that's unfair. But to me, it's insanely liberating and not just liberating. It's empowering to know that my life represents something, that my life is a partisan

that my life means something in terms of a culture that is a lot bigger than me. So if I were to ever become the first black whatever, that wouldn't be something that would be for me. That would be something that would be for us. That would be something that would be meaningful

to people who have survived and persevered under these really crazy odds. And so there's something that's missed when you take this huge cultural situation and you shrink it down. Now, I understand for his life, that's fine. He doesn't want that whole thing. He doesn't think that that's a part of it.

Like when he acts or goes somewhere, he wants to be free from that. To me, it's not a burden or an albatross. it actually is part of what gives me my wings is the fact that so many other people, women and men, have really had to put on for me to be in this situation.

And you know what the funny thing about it is? The funny thing about it is we understand that, or they want us to understand that with everything except for our blackness. Right? Everything except for our blackness they want us to get. right? So if we're watching the Olympics, they want you to care about the metal count of America. They want you to care when somebody is waving an American flag. They want you to go somewhere and be an American.

You know what I mean? They want you to go somewhere and be a representative of a country or a culture. They want you to feel that that's important. And if you're not a patriot, then they tell you that's bad. They say, hey, not caring about all of the people that came before and the total cultural weight of where it is that you are from. They want that to mean something to you. Because that's the thing that makes you go fight somebody and kill someone. That's the thing that makes you go spy on someone. That's the thing that makes you sacrifice. That's the thing that makes you do a little bit less for yourself so that you can do it for everybody else.

The fact that you care about being in America. But when it's about being black, they don't want you to care about that. they didn't want you to take all of the incredible sacrifices that people have made in the diaspora worldwide because Idris Elba is not a black American. And so there are things that here, just keep it all the way, gang. There are things that we would get or feel the need to identify with here that he might not because he is not a black American. But still, in terms of the diaspora, the worldwide black struggle, there should certainly be things that Idis Elba understands about the struggle of being. black. But when it comes to that, they want you to forget it and be like, hey, I'm not this thing. I am Black. I am British. I am Idris. My blackness has nothing to do. My blackness doesn't give me

the strength or the poise that I might need to deliver this role. My blackness doesn't give me the focus. You know what I mean? There's no part of me. I would say that as an artist, it would be important to understand how your cultural background, your heritage, the strength and the clarity of that cultural understanding informs your artistry. That's what I hear when I hear Bob Marley. That's what I hear when I hear Stevie Wonder when I hear Muddy Waters. That's what I hear when I hear Bonner. That's what I hear when I hear the cranberries.

That's what I hear when I hear the Beatles. When I hear all of these different people, when I see all of these different people acting and doing their things and creating music and art, I hear the power of their culture, who they are and what they are, informing their art and making it better. Yeah. And I'm not offended by what Edgis Elvis says. So I'm working very hard to be less offended.

But I'm just looking at it like, why is being black the first? first black, the black this, the black that, not an intense sense of pride. Why does it have to be something that what's wrong with that? Just because you're the first black don't mean you can't be the other, Barack Obama is the first black president. He's a good president. You know what I mean? It's like just because that doesn't mean that that's all you have to be. Why is it happening? Like what And look, if he doesn't feel that way, he doesn't feel that way. But I don't want there to be this misunderstanding that we don't bring that shit with us. And we need to remember and be a part of, you know what I'm saying?

So it's just, I don't know. I just don't like the public announcement behind it. It's like, I don't know what question was posed to him, but I don't like, I don't feel, I don't understand why you felt like you felt like you needed to give that response. So I'm neither, I'm not offended, but I do think that what he's saying is problematic. Because this is where you take that type of quote, where you see the other side take this quote and say, see, this is how Idris thinks. Why don't the rest of you all think like that? Why can't we all just put our color to the side, our race to the side? I mean, look, I'll be real with you.

If I wanted to be a cynic and an asshole about it, the thought would be maybe he wants people to know that he feels that way. And he thinks that that would help him get the James Bond role. You know what I mean? But I don't think that's, I've never seen Idris Elba be anything other than a really stand-up, amazing guy who represents various parts of where he's from. His African roots, we've seen him really embrace. Obviously, he's a proud Englishman. And when he's come over here, he's been one of us. You know what I mean?

So it's like, I just don't think that it's necessary for you to stand there. all dripped in chocolate and just tell people you're not black. It's like, it's just, come on, man. All right. It's just,

I just don't know what this is. I don't either. I don't either. It's like, all, cool. Cool. Hey. No, it's not cool.

It's just, I don't want, whatever niggas be on is what they be on, man. But come on, God damn it. You don't want to be, you don't want to be black. This is the fucking shit. You don't want to be black.

Think about it. You gotta want to be. I'm not even talking about as a man because he said he's a proud black man. I'm talking about as a black actor. Yeah, what that represents. I don't want to be with Dinsale and Angela Bassett. You don't want to be with motherfucking chituel. You don't want to be, you don't want to be with people.

You don't want to be with Michael B. You don't want to be with Sidney Portier. You don't want to be with Cicely Tyson You don't want to be with Motherfucking Bill Duke You don't want to be with a Lawrence

Fishburn Huh? But you've done so many black things You don't want to be with them You don't want to be with them You're not a wire You've done You've done

Tyler Perry movie A movie It's so black It's so black It's so You know what's crazy It makes you feel like Oh you reach the third level

Now you don't want to No it's crazy though because they would have never put Justin Timberlake and daddy's little girls. And Justin Timberlake would have never been Stringerbell. You got those because you black. Okay, let's do it. I love Indy herself.

I hope he's bomb. You know, just come on, guys. Let's, you know. Man. Come on. You know, come on. You know what I mean? Come on, gosh.

Don't do it like that. Bubby. Van Serious question of the week. Is Idris Elba Black? Shut up. I don't do it. Just like, you know, that's like, not to Esquire. You know, if you're in the room.

Don't do it at all. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. I was like, if you're in the room and it's you and Spilberg and the rest of them and you feel like you got to get your shit off that way, nigga I'm not even going to fuck it. It's not for me, but I'm not even going to trip. It's not to Esquire, though.

Because the writers of Esquire, like, ooh, interesting. And of course, they're going to leak the nigger shit. Anyway, Idris will be bond. I love Idris Elba. Just, we all got to continue to learn and continue to grow up. All right, take the big caps off and do not stop learning.

I am Van Lathie Jr. I am Rachel and Lindsay. Bye, guys. Benita-Jolsa!